Blogger’s Note: I haven’t seen any blog posts or articles about this, so I hope that at least a few of you will send me links. I know I am not the only person thinking about this.
For most of last year, I used a BlackBerry Pearl with a text-messaging keyboard. Basically that meant I could type with just one thumb, if I learned the somewhat obscure protocol behind pressing the buttons once for one letter, twice for another, sometimes with words popping up automatically…it was too much for my aging brain. Now I use a BlackBerry Tour and it feels as comfy and familiar as the Smith-Corona I brought to college.
Oh yes, my class was probably one of the very last to matriculate with electric typewriters rather than PCs. I do not miss typewriters one bit, unlike the many Famous Authors who claim that only the soothing rhythm of the keys could propel their great works forward…Yawn. Typewriters made it tough to revise, tough to make your own work better before you even turned it in to a professor, let alone beastly to rewrite if those were the orders of the day from said professor. By the time I started my first post-graduate job, I was working on a word processor and thought it made a great deal of sense.
In other words, I’m not much of a one for looking backwards when it comes to communication devices. I don’t hold up a Luddite banner proudly, and while I often write in pen and ink, agreeing that it allows me to compose differently, I would never, ever give up the ability to type on a screen.
What I do think we should consider giving up, however, is the QWERTY keyboard. I won’t bore you with a recitativo of its history, since you can insta-Google that; I will say that it was invented because of a need to prevent the typebars in mechanical typewriters from clashing and crossing.
The one thing that makes sense about the QWERTY keyboard is its width. If human beings are going to type with two hands, then a keyboard needs to be comfortable for the average handspan (the QWERTY keyboard is famously friendly to the lefthanded English speaker; you can type nearly twice as many words with just the left hand as with the right).
I keep wondering what kinds of ideas, prose, and poetry might be unleashed if we had a different system for typing up text, one that was just as useful for different languages and alphabets (different keyboards for all? Or just one?).
Are there new alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard?
