Is touch-typing relevant in the 'i' universe?

You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? Other People’s Money (1991)

How do you know when a skill is becoming obsolete?

How many of you can touch-type? I don’t mean pecking around the keyboard whether fast or slow; I mean always keeping your index fingers hovered over the ‘home keys’, not looking at the keyboard and cracking out 60 to 90 words per minute using *the correct fingers*.

Touch typing emerged the the late 1880s as a classic before our time technology skill. The need for speed, it seems, led to the development of the QWERTY keyboard which laid out keys in a way that didn’t cause ‘finger jams’ in common English words and the development of a way of typing that increased speed, decreased movement and enabled the typist to say “look! No eyes!”. Classic ergonomic efficiency.

We’ve kept the QWERTY keyboard but most people I ask *say* they can touch-type but really they hunt and peck with one two or five fingers or get confused if they need to use anything other than their thumbs. Has the need for speed and efficiency really diminished over time?

At a recent meeting of middle-aged mothers (AKA bookgroup) we were tut-tutting the demise of proper touch-typing lessons. Why don’t schools teach touch typing? With a stick wrapping the knuckles of poor typists until they reach 60 words per minute? Oh, we had all tried the touch-typing computer programs. I even bought a Spongebob Squarepants version to entice my kids. But we all felt there was no substitution for sitting in front of an IBM Golfball typewriter with a dour lady calling out letters and covering our hands with a cloth.

I am a touch typist who suffered under the stick of a strict typing teacher. I proudly type FAST and earnt extra cash at uni typing up other people’s assignments. Over the past few weeks I consciously considered how much touch-typing I still did. I typed at work (emails, mostly, and the occasional report), home (again emails, mostly), on my phone (texting). The vast majority of my typing was short bursts on my phone or iPad with texting or facebook or quick email messages.

And then it hit me. I was consciously looking for opportunities to use my skill because most devices make in near impossible to touch-type.

Touch-typing is fine if in front of a computer like I am now but on a phone, tablet computer or anything with a non-tactile keyboard or too small to use anything but thumbs then touch-typing seems completely irrelevant. Thumb typing becomes a very important skill – especially being able to type an ‘m’ on a touch screen without deleting several previous letters (or is this only me?) – and a lot of the touch screens I use really only have room for 2-3 fingers at a time.

My 11yo son claims to have learnt touch-typing at school. It’s not touch-typing. I’m not sure what it is, but it is fast. Fast enough to punch out a message and turn off the computer/ipad/phone/video game before his mother can walk from one side of the room to the other to check what he is up to.

So is touch typing a critical skill that is not taught *properly* to our children, or is it an obsolete skill to be abandoned in favour of ergonomic thumb typing? Before you answer, spend some time examining your own typing world and that of your children. I certainly couldn’t find too many devices with the room for all 10 phalanges.

TXT-SPK

Watching today's teenagers communicate via on-line messaging or texting on their mobile phones is like being dropped behind enemy lines in a country where you don't speak the native tongue. You're not quite sure what they're saying, but you know they're probably discussing you, and that if you don't keep your wits about you, it could all turn quite ugly.

It can be a completely foreign language.

In teen-texting, spelling and grammar are tossed out the window, clarity is sacrificed in the quest for speed,  and some words are appropriated for uses they were never intended for. Acronyms reign supreme.

It's almost a form of code.  But is this a new phenomenon?

During World War II, before our time, defence personnel and their sweethearts used acronyms in correspondence.

According to an entry at everything2, the World War II acronyms developed as a way of expressing endearments with extreme brevity (e.g. for use in telegrams) or as a 'secret' language between the lovers. The words could be concealed in sentences, or written across the back of the envelope.

Although some of these examples are well-known now, I wonder if the parents of that generation (and the correspondence censors) were as much in the dark about the meaning of BURMA, SIAM and ENGLAND as today's parents are about PSOS or ROFLMAO?

Some of the less saucy World War II examples are:

• ITALY: I trust and love you
• HOLLAND: Hope our love lasts and never dies
• SWALK: Sealed with a loving kiss

 And my favourite (although a little racier):

• NORWICH: 'Nickers off ready when I come home   

The now widely used acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR are also thought to have had their origins among American military personnel in the Second World War.

But the fun didn't stop with the Silent Generation. The Baby Boomers and their Generation X children have (among a multitude of other language tweaking practices) created a treasure-trove of acronyms to describe demographics and lifestyle choices:

• DINKS: Double income, no kids
• YUPPIES: Young upwardly-mobile professionals 
• LOMBARD: Lots of money but a real dickhead 

And the one which always makes me LOL (laugh out loud):

• SITCOM: Single income, two children, outrageous mortgage 

The corporate world has also weighed in with examples such as:

• SMART goals: Specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, time-bound goals 
• SWOT analysis: Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats analysis 

Imagine these in context:

Q: Where's Bruce?
A: He's in the stationery cupboard, doing a SWOT on the supplies situation. He plans to set some SMARTS regarding paperclips, envelopes and fluoro marker pens.

Most acronyms seem to have originated with the Brits or the Americans, however I did come across one which the good people at BBC' s h2g2 attributed to Australian origins. We Aussies have the dubious honour of coming up with the following acronym to describe someone with an elevated opinion of him/herself:

• FIGJAM: F*** I'm good, just ask me

Is coded language used in your world?

How many phone numbers do you remember?

In a recent article* about the impact of technology one technophobe declared she hardly used any of the functions on her mobile and doesn’t even put phone numbers in the electronic contact list. “I remember them all.  All I want to know about is the green ‘on’ button”.

Wow, yes, I remember keeping loads of phone numbers in my head.  I was good at it.  I topped my year in Geography once because I memorised all the essential facts about Australia such as circumference, area, distances and so forth as if they were telephone numbers.  Now I store telephone numbers in my electronic contact lists and in the case of a small number of close friends – on a post-it on my desk.

Phone numbers are always at hand so why bother to memorise them? I rarely even ask for a phone number because in most cases it comes up on my phone display and I can store the number from there.

Having an aid to remember phone numbers is not new.

The first Rolodexes appeared in the early 1930s

And I bet many of you had one of these, way back when.  Perhaps you still do...

When you use a Rolodex or Teledex you look at the number while you dial.   Do that enough and you’ll commit that number to memory, without even realising it.  Use your phone contact list or your speed dial and you miss that step.  You may never memorise numbers outside those you absolutely have to. 

Some research shows that our ability to remember things is decreasing as technology increasingly takes on that role.  With the vast increase in information available technology provides the means for us to sort and categorise the data and enables us to recall (electronically) than ever before. But then we lose our mobile, or our hard disk crashes and we feel empty, like our very life has been taken away.  Perhaps we wouldn’t feel that way if we were sure that the computer that stays with us 24/7, our brain, was able to recall everything that was important to us.

In my younger years I could remember the phone numbers of all my close friends, my extended family, the school, the doctor, the dentist, the beautician, the pizza joint in Nedlands and later the work numbers of many of my colleagues.  Today I couldn’t tell you my own work number.

I’m off to memorise a few phone numbers. How many can you remember?

 

*Australian Vogue (I know, of all the places!), November 2009 p. 146