Djelloul Marbrook

I suppose some diehards are carrying on literary correspondences that arrive with postal stamps on them. I suppose a subspecies of diehard might even be handwriting their literary correspondences. I write almost everything longhand and then turn to the computer for refiner’s fire. I don’t deplore the passing of a noble tradition. I suspect Pharoah’s scribes would have loved computers. I’ll ask the little plaster scribe who sits on my library bookshelf.

Just as moveable type influenced the way writers write, so must the computer and Internet. We can now exchange our thoughts so speedily that it has become a little dicey to hit the send button without some forethought, to say nothing of the dangers of sending our thoughts to the wrong person by some address-line misadventure. And all those multiple addresses with their blind copies are bound to lead some fine miscarriages of propriety, to say nothing of law suits.

There is now an excitement and spontaneity in our correspondence that has replaced a more formal and considered manner of communicating. Some would say e-mail carries a plague of semi-literacy. I myself think it simply carries the thought and effort we put into it.

That said, I suspect, while confessing I know little about neuroscience, that our brains are being rewired. In short, it seems to me likely the computer, which so often mimicks the human brain that created it, is changing the way we think. Surgeons, following the example of the pilots who flew in the Gulf War, are performing virtual surgeries before entering the operating theater. By the time they actually enter the brain they have rehearsed the scheduled operation several times.

I remember newsrooms stacked with piles of newspapers, spikes piled high with stories, notes and phone messages, and floors awash with yards and yards of teletype copy. There was a separation between the words that in their birth throes killed so many trees and the brain that created them, but that separation is now being transgressed by computers which so much resemble the brain. There is a new and exciting intimacy between the human mind and the words it employs to express itself. Watching the computer screen begins to resemble the synaptic circuitry of the brain itself, and this is bound to change the nature of writing.

I think e-mail is more disposed to reveal the “tell” in the sender’s demeanor than longhand or typewriter correspondence, to use a poker term. It has its own broad array of tics and micro-expressions. It’s more vulnerable, sometimes even naked. Its own facility can betray it. This is not to say it’s inherently more honest. It is, after all, as honest or dishonest as its sender. But just as handwriting reveals the writer, so e-mail has a way of revealing him, too. It’s a bit like handling quicksilver. What I mean is that I think we’ve all by now had the experience of sending an e-mail and then sitting there muttering, Oh God, did I do that?

—DM