Thoughts from a student who had some difficulties with the typing:
Despite the appearance of my typewritten product, I have used a typewriter before, albeit an electric one of my parents. I had alignment troubles on the electric, but not nearly as bad as with these two typewriters (Royal and Webster). I don’t how or why this happened, as I am not familiar with the mechanics of the typewriter. However, I think I exemplify my preference of handwriting to the medium of the typewriter because the form of my typewritten document is contrary to its function.
What I am getting harkens back to Kittler and his notion of human beings being unable to control the media and media influencing and determining our understanding of the world as well as our consciousness of it. The innovation of a typewriter as a machine implies its capability of inner motion and something we don’t fully understand because it is autonomous and doesn’t necessarily require human beings to act upon it in order for it to act. This is shown in my typewritten summary when the lines run together and overlap. The typewriter was invented to standardize handwriting in order to avoid misinterpretation in the workplace. This in turn suppressed individuality, or the tendency for idiosyncrasies of each person to come out when the word was written. Individuality or personality is an external manifestation of how one’s mind works.
With the typewriter, there is an element of depersonalization as well as a proposed paradigm of thinking that I don’t believe accurately reflects how the brain works. All the aspects of handwriting (e.g. how close the lines/words/letters are together, how the different letters are made, scratch outs, etc.) say something about the thought process of the person doing the handwriting. The birth of the typewriter and its intended purpose has influenced people to deem the running together of lines written by the typewriter to be a mistake and start over on a new page as it is more open to a misreading. In this way, I believe that the typewriter is overall less true to the inner workings human brain than handwriting. I think the lines blurring together is symbolic of how the brain makes associations and moves from thought to thought. This is why I kept the way it is. Despite my somewhat frustrating experience, I think that my non-conventional use of the typewriter is even more reflective of brain mechanics, unlike a conventional acceptance and experience of one.
