Technologies that make certain things easy that were once hard (or required lots of capital investment) always get this reaction to some extent from people who were doing it the old way. Obviously they get some satisfaction from doing it the old way, and from being the sort of person who can; and they don't necessarily like to imagine a world in which it's all changed. And they'll often bring up legitimate points: the old way had this or that better quality, though they're overshadowed by the attractions of the new way.
I know that the coming of cheap PC-based word processors was an immensely disruptive event in the world of writing. For me, encountering them as a kid just a few years after I had gotten interested in writing (while I was daunted by the sheer mechanical difficulty of writing in longhand or on typewriters), they were immensely liberating. I just read Bruce Sterling's recent preface to his early novel Schismatrix in which he described his adoption of a word processor as a transforming experience that made the novel possible for him. But at the time, I also remember reading lots of grumpy articles about the downside: in particular, what some literary critics felt was an explosion of excessively long, padded books, and the loss of rewriting discipline that arose from the elimination of the need to retype multiple drafts all the way through. I'm sure that slushpiles expanded exponentially in size around that time, though I haven't seen data on this.
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Date: 2004-02-18 02:04 pm (UTC)I know that the coming of cheap PC-based word processors was an immensely disruptive event in the world of writing. For me, encountering them as a kid just a few years after I had gotten interested in writing (while I was daunted by the sheer mechanical difficulty of writing in longhand or on typewriters), they were immensely liberating. I just read Bruce Sterling's recent preface to his early novel Schismatrix in which he described his adoption of a word processor as a transforming experience that made the novel possible for him. But at the time, I also remember reading lots of grumpy articles about the downside: in particular, what some literary critics felt was an explosion of excessively long, padded books, and the loss of rewriting discipline that arose from the elimination of the need to retype multiple drafts all the way through. I'm sure that slushpiles expanded exponentially in size around that time, though I haven't seen data on this.