Phone vs. Pen: a zero-sum game?
A common complaint made against pen and paper is that they are less ‘efficient’ than phones. In the eyes of many they are anachronistic forebears of the devices which now do it all for us. The general consensus is that you will be more efficient, more productive, more flexible, and more organised if you pick up a phone than if you pick up a pen and paper.
There is evidence to contradict this. The average adult spends over 3 hours on their phone per day. Much of that time is spent scrolling, rather than doing anything that could reasonably be considered productive. That equates to a part-time job consuming content. What, you have to wonder, is the impact of this on their real jobs?
Little consideration is paid to the point of writing with a pen and paper in the first place; the purposes it might serve; the benefits of writing practices as a kind of social good; and the kind of thought it enables.
This isn't a lament about the horrors of tech. It’s rather that, when I tell people that I make and sell journals for a living, I’m often asked the same questions. “Why would you use a journal when you have your phone? Isn’t that a bit old-fashioned when we have phones now? No one writes anymore, do they?” The last question often starts off as a statement and then tails off at the end with a question… Partly to avoid being rude, and partly because they’re not entirely sure themselves. Perhaps their own uncertainty about that point partially answers the question.
People who regards writing as an obsolete practice have are mistaking functionality for value or utility. The two don't always go hand in hand. A phone can hypothetically assist us in accomplishing a great deal, but do we really spend most of our time on our phones accomplishing great things?
Research indicates that the average person checks their phone over 50 times per day, which markedly inhibits people’s ability to daydream. Sentimental as this might first seem, daydreaming holds certain cognitive benefits. According to Erin Westgate, assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Florida, there is a “deeper meaning to it.”
One function attributed to daydreaming is the stimulation of new ideas; a direct consequence of the mind entering what is known as the Default Mode Network - the brain’s default state when not actively focused on a task. The DMN is crucial for the wakeful consolidation of memories, emotional regulation, internal thought-processing and the mind’s relationship with future events. Daydreaming is a form of distraction from the present, and often a positive one.
Conversely, when used as a distraction, a phone holds more nefarious consequences for our cognitive functions. Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine notes: “Phones and digital media are reinforcing for our brains, activating the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. The phones create a compulsive habit loop where we check without thinking and experience withdrawal when we don’t check or don’t have access to our phone.”
Far from allowing us to step out of the confines of our immediate surroundings and enjoy cognitive release, phones simulate a closed-circuit loop. This embeds us into a stultifying, peculiarly mindless present.
It's easy to avoid thinking about how the devices we use in our everyday lives might in fact support the structures that determine what we think we do or don't need. What happened to the idea of writing for the sake of creativity? Pursuits like writing can help us to drive against entrenched societal doctrines that state the most-needed, most valuable pursuits to which we can apply ourselves are those that generate financial gain.
That is to say, pursuits which cannot be commodified are often considered worthless. This is one of the many ways in which capitalism chooses to disregard devalued labour, whilst repeatedly failing to acknowledge that that is exactly the sort of labour on which it resolutely depends (for example, raising children). When these forces operate more subtly, they might appear to say nothing at all, and yet drive our actions subliminally towards those of a profit-driving kind. We see this in the ecosystem of the internet, the price on our heads for our data, and the ubiquity of advertising.
There are other problems with comparing a phone to a pen and paper. Mostly because the comparison being drawn is not a particularly useful one. Likening the one to the other is analogous to comparing a match to a stick. Their innate purpose is not to perform the same function, even if they can be used as such. It is wood's ability to burn that makes it useful for matchmaking, but it is also this flammability that means a tree is likely to die if set on fire. You could, technically, write a novel on a phone, but I doubt you would. What novel writing requires of you - sustained focus, a critical eye, and the hesitating formulation of new thoughts - is exactly what a phone asks us not to summon.
The screen seems, at times, to replace personal judgment as the mediating lens. We receive information rather than conceive of ideas. The supposed omniscience of our phones and what we can find there suspends our capacity for autonomous thought in many instances, causing us to confuse thinking with consuming information.
A phone can technically be used to do most things we could ever want it to (it can do many things which a pen and paper can’t); but what it fails to do in its multi-functionalism is serve our creative and critical interests. A phone is highly functional, but its success partly depends on us demanding less of ourselves. Socrates said, “If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls… because they will rely on that which is written…” What would he have said about phones?
I would suggest that we remove pen and paper from the genealogy of tech entirely. If we think about writing as the pre-cursor to tech, and tech itself as a tale of succession - a constant evolution, from the the hand-written word and analogue communication, to the agile world of the internet and new devices, each model succeeding the last - then writing will always be on the back foot. It should be the contrary. One of the distinct qualities of writing is that is has never really changed. The most striking change has always been that of the hand doing the writing.
Writing pre-dates any system it comes to operate within, or for. It is the mode by which ideas find their form, and the same mode by which those ideas are then surpassed by others. Writing cannot be simplistically re-modelled or improved in and of itself; not without the improvement of the guiding consciousness. It is, necessarily, as contingent as we are. The instability written word, which opens itself wilfully and self-consciously to revision, attracts a kind of integrity. Not integrity of content, necessarily, but integrity of process.
The processes involved in writing are (sometimes barely) perceptible in our awareness of an orchestrating human psyche; this is increasingly difficult to discern as AI is used more and more, but that's a thought for another day. Discussing her novel-writing, Zadie Smith said there is always a marked difference between how a writer thinks about craft versus the way critics think about craft. "Critics are dedicated to the analysis of the craft after the fact. Their accounts are indispensable for anyone who reads fiction and cares for it, but they are not truly concerned with craft as it is practiced... they can't help a writer as she writes." I take this to mean that, whilst a critic can tell us about a piece of writing, the process of writing tells the author about themselves. Writing can be, first and foremost, a dialogue with oneself.
The fact that we are all idiosyncratic, all unique, is paradoxically something we share. Writing can be a symptom of someone's enigmatic mode of cognition; as close as we come to understanding how another mind might whir. That is important.
Over human history, writing has both kept in its lane, and also made it impossible for the world to mind its own business without it. Writing not only records our thoughts, but alters them. It is able to transform minds by continuously asking more of the writer.
