Where is a typewriter when you need one?

Underwood typewrite keyboard (Wikimedia Commons)

My trepidation at writing my first blog for my Communications course at Carleton is probably why I’m up at 2am. My favourite tool for writing, editing, and researching the Internet is my Apple iPad but all my Microsoft apps started crashing yesterday as soon as I tried to open them. I was not even able to get the documents I had saved copied to my computer.

All my class notes, all my essays, virtually everything since September 1st is now locked inside my iPad and currently inaccessible. This brings up an interesting issue for media creators, especially those in the Communications and Journalism fields. We are all tied to new technology and depend on these computers, laptops, and tablets to compose, edit and then submit our creative writing. What happens when they don’t work? What happens when you have hours invested in creating notes, writing articles or reports, composing essays or putting other efforts into your computer only to have it all disappear with a crash? Don’t expect understanding from your peers. The first words out of their mouths will probably be: “You should have made a backup copy”.

It’s not impossible to recreate the documents I’ve lost. In many cases, I printed out my assignments since I find I catch my spelling and grammatical errors better when I review them in printed form. In some cases, there is no need to recreate them because they have already been submitted. In other cases, especially if the course requires electronic submission, I’ll have to retype them from scratch.

With a typewriter, you always had a carbon copy of the document you typed. That copy went into a filing cabinet, the equivalent of a computer hard drive today. It would be filed alphabetically by title, or perhaps chronologically by the date created. Retrieval was just a matter of knowing the filing system.

Today our trust in technology leaves us vulnerable. We don’t save or file hard copies in filing cabinets. We save documents in virtual filing cabinets either on our computer’s hard drive, or to a “cloud” service or an on-line server. In most cases, the document will be there when we go back, but I’m noticing more and more that the increasing complexity of the systems used to store these documents is creating inaccessibility and frustration. Software developers are doing less and less testing before releasing their software or updates making us vulnerable to catastrophic losses.

I’m sure Microsoft will eventually come up with a fix for my problem. In the meantime, deadlines loom and it looks like I have a considerable amount of re-typing to do. Now if I only still had my old typewriter.

Works cited

"File:UnderwoodKeyboard.jpg". Web Image. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons. n.n. 13 Oct. 2015 <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UnderwoodKeyboard.jpg>.