The Right Tool for the Job

There is a school of thought that the medium makes, or helps make, the message.  For instance, a movie starring Tom Hanks released in ‘theatres’ (more likely multiplexes, places to buy cola and starch snack ‘meals’ with a projector booth or ten bolted on to the side, often located in a sort of leisure industrial estate) is better than a straight-to-video movie ‘starring’ ‘Tom Guttenberg’, which in turn is better than anything on Youtube, which in turn is oddly enough not better than your old home movies.

Which means good means film stock?  Maybe.  Just as the medium makes the message so there is a school of thought that the instrument making the message is important.  What else explains the continued existence of Mont Blanc pens in the age of the Bic?

Moreover, ‘stationary fetishism’ is a thing, and not the perverse desire to shag a statue you might think it is.  Rather, it’s the, in my opinion very reasonable, desire to use rather nice notebooks and so on for writing, well, notes on.

No doubt having a good notebook is important.  Anyone using one ‘in the field’ meaning surveyors, farmers, scarecrow spotters, appreciate a notebook with a good stiff cover that supports excited scribblings.

It’s when the notebook becomes a ‘journal’ that definitions become important.  A good stiff journal is invaluable if you are travelling somewhere that lacks wifi or Christianity.  You will need good quality paper that absorbs ink but repels damp, of sufficient weight to swat any winged pest but light enough to be portable and thick enough to stop a dart from a blowpipe.

Back in the day, foreign correspondents used to pound out copy on a vintage (or as they called it back in the day ‘a’) typewriter, and a manual one at that.  At least they did in the movies.  Hacks of all descriptions would hammer at the keys and the mechanical levers would pound the paper.  This, one thinks, is the sort of tool that you need to write about the rise of Hitler, the Blitz, the D-Day landings, the Moon landing, JFK’s rise and fall.  Not all such typewriters would come with optional ashtrays and beverage holders, but if they did it wouldn’t be a bad idea.  A serious instrument for a serious composer of prose, like a Wurlitzer of words.

The manual typewriter survived so long as field kit because, unlike its electronic cousin, it didn’t need to be plugged in.  And so things remained until the advent of the laptop.

Early laptops shared important characteristics with manual typewriters.  They weighed an immense amount and they could stop not just a dart from a blowpipe but just about everything short of a depleted uranium shell.

Laptops endured even beyond the advent of tablets, with their fairy-weight and their Methuselah-like battery life because as soon as you bring up the keyboard on the tablet screen, you have more keyboard than screen and the space left is fit only for the composition of postcards of Haiku.  Or modern news reporting.

However, you can now purchase clip-on keyboards for your tablet.  In fairness, you have been able to purchase lightweight and long lasting laptops for some time now, but they are so svelte that they barely pass the ‘stiff enough to lean on to write a note’ test, never mind the all-important blowpipe dart test which is not only important but also the reason I am not allowed in any branch of PC World in the possession of a length of bamboo.  Such keyboards are marketed as ‘robust’, meaning designed for angry bloggers who hammer at the keys like an enraged gibbon.  Is means that when attached to your tablet they make the ensemble a comforting weight, but still about 1/10th of that of a vintage laptop.

Ultimately, it’s probably not the instrument that’s important, but the message.  the instrument and the medium should not prevent the message being recorded, and that’s about it.

That said, ink on paper has more prestige than pixels on screens so, unless the museums of the future exhibit the flash drives of the famous, notebooks will always have a place.