Interesting (but anecdotal) article about how manual typewriters are making a comeback amongst the younger generations.
Popular wisdom would hold that typewriters are a dying breed, replaced by ever-faster personal computers that do far more than type text. Retailers that once specialized in typewriters have dropped the word from their names, and only one company – Italy’s Olivetti – still makes manuals. Some shop owners lamented that the relics are all but gone.
Not so, said Peggy Tidwell, whose family has owned Los Altos Typewriter since 1967. While she hasn’t seen sales grow in the past five years, recent college graduates and others younger than 30 have bought most of the store’s refurbished typewriters.
“They have no feeling about their computer, but they like their charming little typewriter,” Tidwell said. “It’s got character, and it’s more alive than a computer is.”
For a generation raised with technologies that can be outdated within months, there’s something impressively permanent about a typewriter. And for those used to computers that operate often mysteriously and practically in silence, it’s refreshing to use a machine with visible working parts. It’s similar to teens and 20-somethings choosing the hiss and pop of vinyl records over the clarity of mp3s, said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and popular-culture expert.
“A lot of young people who only experienced in their early youth these types of digital, totally electronic experiences find the tactile, analog stuff very appealing,” said Thompson, noting that a couple of his students have submitted typed papers. Young people who choose typewriters “are very careful about what they do” when they write, he said. “It doesn’t seem as disposable and casual.”
There’s certainly something very “tactile” about a real typewriter, something permanent about it. On the other hand, having grown up with them (I didn’t use a computer to type a paper until, I believe, my senior year in college, and that was an exception), I have no plans on letting the romance of “click, clack, brrrrrrr-ching!” outweigh the ability to cut, paste, edit, spell-check, revise, format, print, e-mail, etc. the documents I work with today, any more than I want to exchange my cell phone for a quarter to use a pay phone on the corner.
(via GeekPress)