Two years ago, I found a Smith Corona Galaxie 12 in the alley behind my apartment building. I spent the next month researching repairs and buying spare parts. I spent the month after that repairing it. When I was done I loaded in the ribbon, lined up my margins and paper and started typing. 

Gabe is typing o na typqriter.

Gabe is t ying ti tpe on a rpewriter.

Never mind.

I had never used a manual typewriter. I got better, but I never found practicality in using it. (Although it was harder to goof around online while writing on it.) Now people come over and ask to use the typewriter once they see it. They make the bell ring and return the carriage a few times. Half of them then say, "I wish I could type on a typewriter." I always answer, "No you don't." 

It's a pain to use a typewriter. The sounds that make it quaint and charming in 2011 get obnoxious after about ten minutes. Mistakes are inevitable and impossible to properly fix. It's hard to line things up. Then you have to retype it into a computer to do anything with it. But my months with the typewriter taught me two things: 

• Computers are better than nostalgia
 
• Slow down

Those two lessons are indicative of technological advances in general. They make life easier, but they eliminate helpful inconveniences.

The newspaper staff at Florida Atlantic University learned what a pain typewriters are this summer when their advisor made them produce an issue without computers. It was all manual typewriters, pencil copy editing, darkroom developing and literal cutting and pasting.

It seems silly, right? Why not make them put together their own printing plates? Why not use slightly older computers? It smacked of the kind of "Back in my day" yammering journalists of any age are prone to.

But it kind of makes sense, too. As the professor justifies: 

1. J-schools teach History of Journalism, so why not live it for a couple weeks?
2. These days, we obsess about technology and don’t always focus on the old-fashioned skills of writing, reporting, shooting, and designing. Remove today’s tech, and guess what’s left?*
3. For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with having a little fun?

In reading the students' reactions to the whole ordeal, it seems like they learned a lesson not mentioned: that tools shape the medium. 

The class found out how software functions like "cut and paste" got their names. For the photographers and designers, this was probably immensely helpful. Adobe software is much easier to use if you understand the analog equivalents. 

It's harder to imagine this is the case for writers. I started journalism school in 2003 with my copy of "The Mac Is Not A Typewriter" (thanks, Mom and Dad) in tow. I knew when to use an em dash and why it was called an em dash. I quickly learned the technical terms of journalism. These didn't help me write at all. 

What helped was being told I couldn't record interviews. Without the safety net, I became a better note taker. It also helped to be told I could only write so many words. Writing to a specific length always, in my experience, yields better results than cutting a longer piece to length. These are techniques that were crafted by the medium. The craft of journalism has been, to a large degree, shaped by the restrictions of media. Concise, to the point sentences make copy understandable, but they also make the copy fit in the space allotted. They save time typing. The inverted pyramid, which is the base structure for almost every straight news article, is a necessity of the "cut from the bottom" school of newspaper editing. The influence of standard definition and the 4:3 aspect ratio is clear in modern TV news videography. 

McLuhan said "We shape our tools and our tools thereafter our tools shape us." It's true. But we're in an awkward time now, creatively. We're in a world created with technology that's obsolete, and our minds haven't yet caught up with the latest tools. Having a spellcheck is great, but needing to use it because Mavis Beacon taught us to type 120 words a minute is no good. The mind can't create that fast. Someday it will.

So I can see the value in forgoing technology to teach a lesson about work. One of the Florida newspaper students said he got more work done without the computer because he had to rely on his colleagues. But he was also probably working slower than he usually does, too: turning to a dictionary or a coworker to figure out a spelling or an awkward sentence. The dread of retyping to correct errors is enough to make everyone more thoughtful. Typing on a manual typewriter is hard. When everything from editing to typing is physically and mentally exhausting, you become more careful and it shows in the results. It's not that more work is done, it's that less work is necessary after the fact. There's less need to make micro edits after a piece is written.

While using the old tools gives us a better understanding and appreciation of our current tools, it also tempts us to limit ourselves. This is dangerous. Too often, creators who dabble in the old ways see them as perfect and look no further. They will stay stuck in an era and ignore many of the functions of their new tools. 

For example, working in radio, I'm grateful I had to learn analog editing. Linear editing instills a perspective that affects how I record and mix the pieces I do for work and for fun. But I was fortunate enough to learn digital editing simultaneously. I don't lean on the attitude that I can fix things in postproduction, but I'm aware that there are far fewer limits to what I can do on a computer than to what I could do with magnetic tape. Like with Photoshop and In Design, modern audio software has two sets of features. The larger and most popular set is made up of the digitalized and streamlined versions of analog tools: cut, paste, fade, mix. The second, smaller set is a completely new toolbox: noise reduction, 90-track mixes. When you're used to only the old set, or when you see no reason (other than the time and money advantage) of using the software over its analog equivalent, you ignore the potential for innovation. Sure, you're more free to innovate when you can try anything and undo it, but unless the new features are utilized, nothing will sound truly new. Radiolab would sound completely different if it were done on tape and not in ProTools.

Unfortunately, the boundaries of good taste are always short of the boundaries of technology. Look at 90s album covers, magazines in the first decade of this century and almost every David Bowie video. There's plenty of truly abysmal, instantly-dated digital artwork. It's the result of overindulgence, which, in many cases, is itself the result of a lack of appreciation for the old ways.

This isn't new. There has always been trash. Over time, the crap that anyone can create with the latest means of production is filtered out. This is why it's easy to think of the fairly recent past as time when so much media was good. The truly awful became camp and the good stuff stands out. Eventually, news stories and novels typed at 120 words per minute will be brilliant. Eventually, the technical limitations of blogs will be apparent in the newest form of news. Eventually. Until then, I'm glad I have kets for 1 and delete. 

*Point two seems a little off. The tools they used were the modern conveniences of their day and (especially in terms of design) they put limits on what could be done. Nostalgia will ruin the news media because at some point, a huge number of journalists decided the field peaked decades ago and therefore any advances beyond that point are blasphemy.