[wordup] Amish for QWERTY

[Adam Shand]

From:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish_qwerty.html

Amish for QWERTY
by Cory Doctorow
07/09/2003

I learned to type before I learned to write. The QWERTY keyboard layout 
is hard-wired to my brain, such that I can't write anything of 
significance without that I have a 101-key keyboard in front of me. This 
has always been a badge of geek pride: unlike the creaking pen-and-ink 
dinosaurs that I grew up reading, I'm well adapted to the modern reality 
of technology. There's a secret elitist pride in touch-typing on a 
laptop while staring off into space, fingers flourishing and caressing 
the keys.

But last week, my pride got pricked. I was brung low by a phone. Some 
very nice people from Nokia loaned me a very latest-and-greatest 
camera-phone, the kind of gadget I've described in my science fiction 
stories. As I prodded at the little 12-key interface, I felt like my 
father, a 60s-vintage computer scientist who can't get his wireless 
network to work, must feel. Like a creaking dino. Like history was 
passing me by. I'm 31, and I'm obsolete. Or at least Amish.

People think the Amish are technophobes. Far from it. They're 
ideologues. They have a concept of what right-living consists of, and 
they'll use any technology that serves that ideal -- and mercilessly 
eschew any technology that would subvert it. There's nothing wrong with 
driving the wagon to the next farm when you want to hear from your son, 
so there's no need to put a phone in the kitchen. On the other hand, 
there's nothing right about your livestock dying for lack of care, so a 
cellphone that can call the veterinarian can certainly find a home in 
the horse barn.

For me, right-living is the 101-key, QWERTY, computer-centric mediated 
lifestyle. It's having a bulky laptop in my bag, crouching by the 
toilets at a strange airport with my AC adapter plugged into the 
always-awkwardly-placed power source, running software that I chose and 
installed, communicating over the wireless network. I use a network that 
has no incremental cost for communication, and a device that lets me 
install any software without permission from anyone else. Right-living 
is the highly mutated, commodity-hardware- based, public and free 
Internet. I'm QWERTY-Amish, in other words.

I'm the kind of perennial early adopter who would gladly volunteer to 
beta test a neural interface, but I find myself in a moral panic when 
confronted with the 12-button keypad on a cellie, even though that 
interface is one that has been greedily adopted by billions of people 
worldwide, from strap-hanging Japanese schoolgirls to Kenyan electoral 
scrutineers to Filipino guerrillas in the bush. The idea of paying for 
every message makes my hackles tumesce and evokes a reflexive moral 
conviction that text-messaging is inherently undemocratic, at least 
compared to free-as-air email. The idea of only running the software 
that big-brother telco has permitted me on my handset makes me want to 
run for the hills.

The thumb-generation who can tap out a text-message under their desks 
while taking notes with the other hand -- they're in for it, too. The 
pace of accelerated change means that we're all of us becoming wed to 
interfaces -- ways of communicating with our tools and our world -- that 
are doomed, doomed, doomed. The 12-buttoners are marrying the phone 
company, marrying a centrally controlled network that requires 
permission to use and improve, a Stalinist technology whose centralized 
choke points are subject to regulation and the vagaries of the telcos. 
Long after the phone companies have been out-competed by the pure and 
open Internet (if such a glorious day comes to pass), the kids of today 
will be bound by its interface and its conventions.

The sole certainty about the future is its Amishness. We will all bend 
our brains to suit an interface that we will either have to abandon or 
be left behind. Choose your interface -- and the values it implies -- 
carefully, then, before you wed your thought processes to your fingers' 
dance. It may be the one you're stuck with.

Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of Boing Boing and the Outreach 
Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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As Cory says, choose your interface carefully. It might be the one 
you're stuck with.