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New Yorker Article: Can "Distraction-Free" Devices Change the way we write?
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Posted by Pixelpunker
Jun 9, 2022 at 07:11 PM
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/can-distraction-free-devices-change-the-way-we-write
A fun read.
Full disclosure: I own a remarkable paper tablet, I owned an Alphasmart Neo, dabbled with Scrivener, iA Writer, read Matthew Kirschenbaums book “Track Changes”. All mentioned in the article. I never bought a Freewrite, but often thought about it.
Posted by Pixelpunker
Jun 9, 2022 at 07:13 PM
The tag line of the article:
> The digital age enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Now writers are rebelling against their word processors.
And the best quote:
> Computers made the writer’s life easier, until they made it harder.
Posted by Cyganet
Jun 9, 2022 at 09:10 PM
What’s your view on the Remarkable tablet? Is it easy to sync your writing so you can work with the text on a laptop later?
Posted by Lucas
Jun 9, 2022 at 10:01 PM
Thanks for his. Yes, a fun read. I’m more of a structured person, hence outlining, but there is much in the article that I can relate to.
It does strike me that the young author might not quite realize how much innovation occurred in earlier years. He writes:
“Then, in the late twenty-teens, focussed writing tools started cropping up everywhere.”
I would say that this trend started earlier. The author himself notes that iA Writer was released in 2010, which is also around when WriteRoom was released. But there were already focused writing programs well before that. I believe Ulysses was released in 2003.
I’m also wonder about this statement about iA Writer:
“The app’s key innovation is “focus mode,” an option that vertically centers the sentence or paragraph being written and grays out everything else.”
Was this really iA Writer’s innovation? There were already apps before that with “Typewriter Mode” (or “Typewriter Scrolling”)—keeping the currently edited line in the middle of the screen. So that part wasn’t an innovation. Was iA Writer indeed the first to introduce greying out other lines?
Posted by Amontillado
Jun 10, 2022 at 12:11 AM
I agree, a fun read, quite a bit more so than most articles about the pursuit of distraction free devices.
My Alphasmart Neo was a way to write on a small sailboat without fear of dropping a thousand dollar Macbook overboard. It worked fine at anchor, but spent most of its long battery life at lunch, in my truck in parking lots, anywhere I was with a moment to write.
Some immunity to distraction by features is possible. I don’t use Word so I can’t speak for its distraction free mode. It sounds like how I often write, with toolbars and other edit window features turned off in my word processor.
Fonts aren’t something I mess with while writing. Appearance needs to be set in styles, not willy-nilly. That realization came when I was participating in two writers groups, each with their own strict ideas of document formatting. All I had to do was load the right style set to have the right appearance for a group.
You can do that with Scrivener’s compile feature. I found that the style sets supported by word processors like Mellel and Nisus were what I needed.
That article very much rang true. I had a Freewrite. I found it just after their Kickstarter campaign closed, and before their web site revealed certain details like no editing. And you couldn’t delete a file, a feature I think was added later. I gave my Freewrite away.
Thanks for the link!