Some of My Best Friends have Computers

I find the use of "strikethrough" in the blogging world intriguing. Wikipedia tells us that "it signifies one of two meanings. In ink-written, typewritten, or other non-erasable text, the words are a mistake and not meant for inclusion. When used on a computer screen, however, it indicates recently-deleted information. (The difference is that in the latter situation, the struck-through text previously was a legitimate part of the document.)"

Using strikethrough on a computer is at best a nod to that past, and lets the reader into the thought processes of the writer. It works much better on paper, however, and in particular on poetry manuscripts, where you can see the changes that the writer made (or his editor, in the case of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) to his poem.

Wendell Berry, in his essay, "Feminism, the Body and the Machine" (which, incidentally, changed my life and was the impetus for me getting my typewriter, which is the only "toy" we have at our house to entertain small children guests, and which I delight in pounding out letters on), discusses how paper is a palimpsest (delightful word!) in a way that a computer screen can never be (forgive me if I quote at length):

The computer apologists, it seems to me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact. I don’t mean that a writer should be a fine calligrapher and write for exhibition, but rather that handwriting has a valuable influence on the work so written. I am certainly no calligrapher, but my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement. As the longhand is transformed into typescript and then into galley proofs and the printed page, it seems increasingly to resist improvement. More and more spunk is required to mar the clean, final-looking lines of type. I have the notion—again not provable—that the longer I keep a piece of work in longhand, the better it will be.

... Much is made of the ease of correction in computer work, owing to the insubstantiality of the light-image on the screen; one presses a button and the old version disappears, to be replaced by the new. But because of the substantiality of paper and the consequent difficulty involved, one does not handwrite or typewrite a new page every time a correction is made. A handwritten or typewritten page therefore is usually to some degree a palimpsest; it contains parts and relics of its own history—erasures, passages crossed out, interlineations—suggesting that there is something to go back to as well as something to go forward to. The light-text on the computer screen, by contrast, is an artifact typical of what can only be called the industrial present, a present absolute. A computer destroys the sense of historical succession, just as do other forms of mechanization.

...All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed, is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the handwritten page; it is a palimpsest.

...It would be uncharitable and foolish of me to suggest that nothing good will ever be written on a computer. Some of my best friends have computers.

...But I do say that in using computers writers are flirting with a radical separation of mind and body, the elimination of the work of the body from the work of the mind. The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factorymade look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.