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Comment by DaltonCoffee | Hacker News Reader

"Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension[…] The extension of a technology like the automobile “amputates” the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. ways.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Love this quote, and many others by MM. Utterly blows my mind how we seem to be failing to apply and extend his teachings to help understand this modernity beta test we're participating in.

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...and the pen/quill/cuneiform killed the saga since people could now write it down, so why bother remembering to tell a story around a campfire at a certain time a week? (sound familiar today?)

I get the point, but I think "amputates" is the wrong word, like user "tootie" below who said "obviates" is the right word, but was downvoted into greyville. Tootie is right: it alleviates the need for something. It doesn't kill it entirely.

When the technology breaks, we still need to communicate. So yes, teach people how to write their language (or more!) But cursive writing has always been notoriously riddled difficulties due to individual hiccups in style. I agree everyone should know how to write in the simplest form: printing English/European languages, simplified Chinese, etc. But flourishy cursive is only readable by people who wrote it with artistic skills, or kids that were drilled for hours and hours on end, when there is plenty of other more important stuff for them to learn, IMHO.

I think you'd really like Lewis Mumford too.

Ellul, Mumford, McLuhan, Postman and Illich constitute (accessible [1]) Technological Critique 101. I think they are essential reading for anyone who claims to be a "technologist" and wants to deeply understand the anthropological relations of humans and our technology.

[1] Without digging into Heidegger and more difficult stuff.

I think "obviate" is a better term than "amputate". I mean, who the hell cares about penmanship? Absolutely useless skill.

While I empathise with your position I can totally see how others might not. Letter writing is a specific skill to provide a dense and clear message. You have to prepare this message in your head first as you cannot (attractively) eliminate what you wrote already unless you redo the whole letter. Im sure many people today would have benefitted from more occasions to hone thinking and preparation ahead of expressing views or opinions.

Similarly you could say remembering phone numbers is a useless skill that many had pre smartphones - you just knew your 30 or so most used numbers. Now we all depend on our phones and once the battery is dead many people don't seem to know any number by heart.

> provide a dense and clear message

There is Twitter for that

If I handwrite a letter, I'm filtering before and while I write to reduce all the nonsense that might pass through my head down to something I hope will be of interest to the recipient.

If I tweet, I can shoot out all of that nonsense to the world, secure in the knowledge that the filtering labor will be done in combination by some subset of potential recipients (whose choices to engage or not will provide the fodder that the Twitter feed-building algorithm can use to determine whether it's passed the filter).

This might then indicate that a skill that might be atrophying is the ability to filter one's own writing for relevance/value, not just to produce it in cursive.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what other signs they would look for to confirm or disconfirm this hypothetical atrophy.

Haha you were never passed notes in high school. My most embarrassingly awful messages were all hand written. I am very careful with my emails because editing is so easy.

I passed notes extensively in high school – it's a lot of them I'm thinking of! A friend has saved a box of the ones I wrote her and it's fun to revisit.

Email's interesting because there's traditionally been very little of that social-media-feed-style automatic sorting / filtering outside of spam (not that the "priority inbox" concept isn't trying) so the weight still properly lies on the sender to make the missive easy to handle. I too edit the bejesus out of all my work emails, but it's a different skill than having to compose a coherent first draft without easy edits.

I almost got water up my nose, you ass.

Clearly dense, yes.

I would recommend (the now outdated) The Brain that Changes Itself. All about nueroplasticiy. The brain will literally prune what you don’t use, and certain skills, such as the fine motor skills required by developing penmanship, can plausibly have wide reaching impact one way or the other.

Because it's a metaphor. "Extension of mankind" implies, poetically, a physical connection between mankind and technology. Physical connections are amputated, not obviated. A withered limb isn't obviated, it's cut off. So, amputated.

I got an incredible amount of pushback on twitter when I posted that I think we should ditch handwriting in schools in favor of accelerating typing skills earlier.

Rightfully so. People still have to physically write.

Saying “no” is not a persuasive argument.

They do teach how to touch type in schools

My kids are in school right now in the US. They teach cursive for a few days just so kids recognize it but there's no penmanship. They also don't teach spelling because it's not at all useful for developing critical thinking and spelling will evolve on it's own just with reading. COVID definitely accelerated things but lots of homework assignments are done in Google Classroom.

The actual hardest thing to go paperless is math. When they teach strategies and ask to "show your work" there's no easy way to type it.

> The actual hardest thing to go paperless is math.

Reminds me of Tips for Mathematical Handwriting:

https://johnkerl.org/doc/ortho/ortho.html

Yep agree I’m referring to penmanship, they still need to be able to do math and write to the degree necessary for algebra etc.

Damn, how have I not heard of Marshall McLuhan before? Getting that book now.

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