Humming away in offices on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon and in the White House is a technology that represents the pragmatism, efficiency and unsentimental nature of American bureaucracy: the autopen. It is a device that stores a person’s signature, replicating it as needed using a mechanical arm that holds a real pen.
Like many technologies, this rudimentary robotic signature-maker has always provoked ambivalence. We invest signatures with meaning, particularly when the signer is well known. During the George W Bush administration, the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, generated a small wave of outrage when reporters revealed that he had been using an autopen for his signature on the condolence letters that he sent to the families of fallen soldiers.
Fans of singer Bob Dylan expressed ire when they discovered that the limited edition of his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, which cost nearly $600 and came with an official certificate “attesting to its having been individually signed by Dylan”, in fact had made unlimited use of an autopen. Dylan took the unusual step of issuing a statement on his Facebook page: “With contractual deadlines looming,” Dylan wrote, “the idea of using an autopen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.” He also acknowledged that: “Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately.”
Our mixed feelings about machine-made signatures make plain our broader relationship to handwriting: it offers a glimpse of individuality. Any time spent doing archival research is a humbling lesson in the challenges and rewards of deciphering the handwritten word. You come to know your long-dead subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged, while another’s pristine pages suggest the diligence of a medieval monk. The calligraphist Bernard Maisner argues that calligraphy, and handwriting more broadly, is “not meant to reproduce something over and over again. It’s meant to show the humanity, the responsiveness and variation within.”
But handwriting is disappearing. A high-school student who took the preliminary SAT used for college admittance in the US confessed to the Wall Street Journal that “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a one-sentence statement that all the work is the student’s own, in cursive, or joined-up handwriting. “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from Grandma.”
The Common Core State Standards for education in the US, which outline the skills students are expected to achieve at each grade level, no longer require students to learn cursive writing. Finland removed cursive writing from its schools in 2016, and Switzerland, among other countries, has also reduced instruction in cursive handwriting. One assessment claimed that more than 33% of students struggle to achieve competency in basic handwriting, meaning the ability to write legibly the letters of the alphabet (in both upper and lower case). “We’re trying to be realistic about skills that kids are going to need,” said one school board member in Greenville, South Carolina. “You can’t do everything. Something’s got to go.” Children who cannot write in cursive also can’t read it.
Schoolchildren are not the only ones who can no longer write or read cursive. Fewer and fewer of us put pen to paper to record our thoughts, correspond with friends, or even to jot down a grocery list. Instead of begging a celebrity for an autograph, we request a selfie. Many people no longer have the skill to do more than scrawl their name in an illegible script, and those who do will see that skill atrophy as they rely more on computers and smartphones. A newspaper in Toronto recorded the lament of a pastry instructor who realised that many of his culinary students couldn’t properly pipe an inscription in icing on a cake – their cursive writing was too shaky and indistinct to begin with.
As a practical skill in the digital world, handwriting seems useless. There is a term in Chinese, tibiwangzi, which means “take pen, forget character”. It describes how more frequent use of computers and smartphones has discouraged the use of traditional Chinese handwriting, including the ability to write traditional characters. Chinese children pick up a pen to write (“take pen”) but experience a kind of “character amnesia” when it comes to putting pen to paper (“forget character”). According to the China Youth Daily Social Survey Center, 4% of Chinese youth are “already living without handwriting”.
What does it mean to live without handwriting? The skill has deteriorated gradually, and many of us don’t notice our own loss until we’re asked to handwrite something and find ourselves bumbling as we put pen to paper. Some people still write in script for special occasions (a condolence letter, an elaborately calligraphed wedding invitation) or dash off a bastardised cursive on the rare occasions when they write a cheque, but apart from teachers, few people insist on a continued place for handwriting in everyday life.
But we lose something when handwriting disappears. We lose measurable cognitive skills, and we also lose the pleasure of using our hands and a writing implement in a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another. We lose the sensory experience of ink and paper and the visual pleasure of the handwritten word. We lose the ability to read the words of the dead.
We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe. We communicate more but with less physical effort, forgetting the vast evolutionary history that fitted us for physical movement and expression as a means of understanding our world.
In 2000, physicians at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles took a remedial handwriting course. “Many of our physicians don’t write legibly,” the chief of the medical staff explained to Science Daily. And unlike many professions, doctors’ bad writing can have serious consequences, including medical errors and even death; a woman in Texas won a $450,000 award after her husband took the wrong prescription medicine and died. The pharmacist had misread the doctor’s poorly handwritten instructions. Even though many medical records are now stored on computers, physicians still spend a lot of their time writing notes on charts or writing prescriptions by hand.
Clarity in handwriting isn’t merely an aid to communication. In some significant way, writing by hand, unlike tracing a letter or typing it, primes the brain for learning to read. Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared students taking class notes by hand or on a laptop computer to test whether the medium mattered for student performance. Earlier studies of laptop use in the classroom had focused on how distracting computer use was for students. Not surprisingly, the answer was very distracting, and not just for the notetaker but for nearby peers as well.
Mueller and Oppenheimer instead studied how laptop use affected the learning process for students who used them. They found that “even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing”. In three different experiments, their research concluded that students who used laptop computers performed worse on conceptual questions in comparison with students who took notes by hand. “Laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning,” they wrote. In other words, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarise as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.
The researchers studying how technology transforms the way we write and learn are akin to ecologists who warn of species decline or environmental pollution. We face a future without handwriting. Researchers worry that abandoning the pen for the keyboard will lead to any number of unforeseen negative consequences. “The digitisation of writing entails radical transformations of the very act of writing at a sensorimotor, physical level and the (potentially far-reaching) implications of such transformations are far from properly understood,” notes Anne Mangen, who studies how technology transforms literacy. Writing on a keyboard with the words appearing on the screen is more “abstract and detached”, something she believes has “far-reaching implications, educationally and practically”. Like species decline, skills decline gradually.
It is popular to assume that we have replaced one old-fashioned, inefficient tool (handwriting) with a more convenient and efficient alternative (keyboarding). But like the decline of face-to-face interactions, we are not accounting for what we lose in this tradeoff for efficiency, and for the unrecoverable ways of learning and knowing, particularly for children. A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.
As a physical act, writing requires dexterity in the hands and fingers as well as the forearms. The labour of writing by hand is also part of the pleasure of the experience, argues the novelist Mary Gordon. “I believe that the labour has virtue, because of its very physicality,” she writes. “For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.”
Handwriting is also evocative in a way the printed word is not. Literature abounds with plot twists prompted by the appearance of a handwritten letter or signature. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Lady Dedlock recognises the unusual handwriting of her former fiance, whom she thought dead, on a legal document, prompting the events that lead to the revelation of her greatest secret.
Our own handwriting can be a surprisingly effective prompt to memory. When American chef and cookbook author Deborah Madison stumbled upon some old handwritten recipes from the 1970s, she was transported back in time. Jotted down in brown notebooks along with notes and doodles and food stains and lists of suppliers that she used for the restaurant Greens in San Francisco, the recipes were “a record of time spent fitting new thoughts together”, she wrote. “At times it looks careful and deliberate. Other times my hand gets distracted and strays, looks sloppy and tired. But mostly it conveys such a deep sense of discovery that reading through these notebooks, I am reinfected with the obsessive excitement I felt then.” She doesn’t think the same feeling would emerge from a list written on a computer: “There’s much to be said for the mark of the hand.”
The novelist Mohsin Hamid takes notes by hand in notebooks and tries to remove himself from the online world when he is working on a novel, although he writes his novels on a computer. “The technology is shaping me, configuring me” when he uses it, he told the BBC, and he sees danger in embracing machine-like ways of doing things. The human way of doing things imposes limits, depending on our tools. Ten fingers can fly across a keyboard, but the experience of writing with a pen or pencil in one hand requires more patience. The average American can type 40 words a minute but can only write 13 words a minute by hand. As the calligraphist Paul Antonio notes, when he teaches children to write, he is really teaching them to slow down.
As the IT way of looking at the world replaces other ways of knowing, our wilful deskilling of longstanding human activities is not only happening with handwriting. Other embodied skills, also valuable, are at risk of disappearing.
“When we focus on making a physical object, or on playing a musical instrument, our concentration level is mainly self-directed,” the sociologist Richard Sennett argues. The act of manipulating a tool or of drawing a bow across a string forces us to feel and do simultaneously, and the more skilled we become at the act, the less we have to think about what we are doing. This form of “situated cognition”, as Sennett calls it, takes time to develop. It also forces us to slow down, as we see when we study people who make things by hand. “Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to slow down labour,” Sennett told American Craft magazine. “Making is thinking.”
Lee Miller, a bootmaker in Austin, Texas, spends up to 40 hours hand-crafting a single pair of boots using tools that are more than 100 years old. Miller notes how the time dedicated to his craft is inseparable from what he creates. “No automated machine can do as fine work as the human hand can,” he argues. His customers, who are willing to wait years for the custom boots he makes, agree.
The significance of the handmade object derives from our knowledge of the time and effort and skill that went into making it; even the most sophisticated machine churning out identically sophisticated objects doesn’t inspire the same feeling. “We are knowing as well as sensing creatures,” the philosopher Julian Baggini writes. “Knowing where things come from, and how their makers are treated, does and should affect how we feel about them.” One need not belong to the elite to enjoy the luxury of owning handmade goods; platforms such as Etsy offer a wide array of handmade goods for every budget.
Some critics argue that our desire for handmade goods is increasing because so much of what we buy is now mass-produced, alienating us from a human connection to the objects we use. This is perhaps one reason that the revelations of horrific working conditions at the Chinese factories that make iPhones prompted outrage. The recognition that these sleek technologies emerged from overworked – even suicidal – human hands changed the way we understood them, at least until the outrage faded and the new version of the iPhone landed in stores.
Our desire for the mark of the human hand hasn’t diminished. Today we satisfy it in a novel way, however. We embrace a vicarious form of craftsmanship comprised of images of well-made things rather than the things themselves. We look at perfectly prepared meals on Instagram, or the efforts of strangers on home remodelling TV shows and do-it-yourself videos on YouTube, which range in quality from highly produced plumbing tutorials to boring, badly lit snippets of people mowing their lawns (which still somehow garner tens of millions of views). This is in keeping with the growth of other vicarious pursuits.
New forms of hands-on making have arisen, forms more in step with our technological age, such as the maker movement, which grew out of a late-20th-century hacker culture that sought to give individuals more power over how their technologies worked. Chris Anderson, who left his position as editor of Wired magazine to join a DIY drone-making company, argues that this new breed of DIY tech tinkerers and 3D printing mavens are responding to a culture that has become too invested in the virtual. “Making something that starts virtual but quickly becomes tactile and usable in the everyday world is satisfying in a way that pure pixels are not,” he wrote, predicting that the growing number of “makerspaces” would usher in a new industrial revolution. Critics such as Evgeny Morozov argue that the movement hasn’t produced a revolution but rather another form of “consumerism and DIY tinkering” sponsored by large corporations and the US military.
On a beam in the library of 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne’s home near Périgord, France, is carved a liberal paraphrase of a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes: “You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.” Montaigne embraced the human body in all its glorious and alarming incarnations (his essays contain gleeful descriptions of his own and others’ bouts of flatulence) and he criticised the hypocrisy of those who deny their corporeality. Our bodies are one of the central ways we understand ourselves, Montaigne believed. They are a reminder of our frailty and a check on the ego. “And upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses,” he wrote.
The physical requirements of everyday life in Montaigne’s time were fundamentally different from our own, and far more difficult, prompting greater humility. Such humility is rare in our technological age. The mundane tasks we perform every day with our bodies seem insignificant compared with the powers available to us when midwifed by our new technologies. It’s easier, physically, to send a message to the other side of the world than it is to tie your own shoelace.
But our instruments and tools remain extensions of our bodies in crucial ways. As the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his book Computer Power and Human Reason, we must “internalise aspects of [our tools] in the form of kinesthetic and perceptual habits”. Our tools become part of us. In a similar way, our bodies help us find our way in the world. “The body is our first and most natural technical object,” the French sociologist Marcel Mauss observed.
Our choice of tools and the way we use them facilitate not only habits of hand but also habits of mind. Our embodied experiences shape not only how we learn to do mundane things, but also how we understand the world around us. In Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose, one of the characters describes the mores of an earlier generation: his grandmother, who grew up on a farm, “could kill a chicken, and dress it, and eat it afterward, with as little repugnance as her neighbour”. Her generation had a different relationship to the physical world, which was reflected in the way they understood its challenges. “When animals died, the family had to deal with their bodies; when people died, the family’s women laid them out.”
Today, we experience less discomfort and don’t confront our bodies’ failures as often. Our increased comfort may mean that we struggle more with our bodies’ inevitable decline, often using technology to prolong life for as long as possible.
Some of our disappearing habits, such as handwriting and drawing, might not seem important. They are modest skills whose benefits are experienced privately, cannot easily be monetised (unless you are that rare thing, a professional calligrapher), and whose use in daily life no longer makes sense for an increasing number of people.
Yet the quiet disappearance of handwriting from our lives shows how the extinction of certain experiences happens: experiences recede gradually, not through some top-down edict or bottom-up populist campaign. And we rationalise their obsolescence not as a loss but as another mark of progress and improvement. A skill fades, and with it a human experience that spans millennia. Even those experiences leave a trace, like the cave drawings in Altamira and Lascaux, painted about 40,000 years ago and hundreds of miles apart, which both contain images of the same thing: the human hand.
Handwriting’s rapid decline in a world dominated by screens is also a symbol of how thoughtlessly we’ve settled between the old and the new. New technologies don’t have to destroy old ways of doing things. The printing press didn’t destroy handwriting. There is no reason to assume the triumph of the keyboard and touchscreen over pen and paper is inevitable, or that software spells the end of drawing by hand, or that the encroachment of technology in the classroom need force out more traditional embodied forms of learning. We can achieve some form of coexistence, even if it is likely to be an uneasy rather than a peaceful one.
“For our flesh surrounds us with its own desires,” the poet Philip Larkin wrote. It also surrounds us with opportunities – to learn, to understand, to feel in a way that our vicarious, screen-based experiences do not. As our world becomes ever more saturated with images and virtualisations, we shouldn’t let our desire for alluring technologies eclipse the human need to see, touch and make things with our hands.
This is an edited extract from The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World, published by the Bodley Head