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Devil's Advocate: Christmas letters
And, er, human computer interfaces

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 07 January 2003

Forget Christmas cards. Martin Brampton's recent Christmas letters tell us a great deal more about humans and technology, past, present and future...

Over Christmas, I was thinking about the interface between humans and computers. It was not how I spent most of my time, I must admit. But my Christmas cards included a number of often quite long letters from friends and family, and they started me wondering.

Now it is obvious that these letters have only become popular by virtue of many people gaining access to computers. We could take the view that the computer is merely incidental to the creation of an interface between humans. The general question then is what changes have occurred in the technology of communications between people, and how might these develop in the future?

It is usually believed that humans acquired speech as our first venture into the richness of language, with writing added afterwards. Given appropriate education, we can usually acquire the capacity for speech without the need for any technological aid. Although we now have a whole host of technologies devoted to the storage and transmission of speech, much of the time we still talk to people face to face.

Writing has never been like that. It always involved technology of some kind. Just because we now take it for granted, we tend to suppose that writing is easy and almost as natural as speech. Yet for a very long time it was extremely difficult and involved a great variety of techniques. Clay tablets were an early possibility but the results are not very portable or very durable. Stone is better but you need to be a skilled craftsman to cut lettering into stone. Modern typography still owes a great deal to the lettering found in Roman inscriptions.

Animal skins provided a more practical way to record information but had to be carefully prepared and were consequently expensive. With all these difficulties, although books were written in antiquity, very few copies were made, and many were lost in disasters such as the fire at the great library of Alexandria. Our access to many early Greek texts is only possible through copies made by the Arabs and retrieved in the period of Moorish activity in Europe.

Our familiar writing tools are all very modern, by comparison. Ready availability of paper is a modern phenomenon, as are the pencil and the fountain pen. Even more modern is the ubiquitous ballpoint pen. On reflection it seems that what we take to be the natural way to create written communications is actually the outcome of millennia of technological development.

The Christmas letters mostly abandon writing in favour of print, although some writers choose a typestyle that emulates handwriting. Some of them are really quite sophisticated, including colour pictures, with the text neatly flowing around them. Often, they take advantage of the many typefaces that have been developed over centuries. A good typeface is a work of art but is also highly practical, having been designed both to look good and to be easily readable.

Writers of Christmas letters have almost certainly not been deterred from their efforts by the need to use a keyboard. Although I cannot be sure that voice recognition or some other technique was used, it is a safe bet that most of these letters were entered on the familiar computer keyboard. But why would we regard this as a particular problem?

Given the complex and extensive history of technology devoted to the creation of writing, it becomes quite clear that there is no form of written communication that could really be described as natural. There is only a question of familiarity. We have also noted that writers are willing to go to some trouble to present communications in an appealing and readable way. That looks like a solid foundation for a rational review of how our interface with computers might develop.

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (http://www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He is a frequent contributor to silicon.com's weekly Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk.