Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
First Posted JUNE 2017
One of my favorite tech-history books. I think my review went a little hyperlink wild, and doesn’t really need all the references to what I was doing at the time. Still cannot recommend this book more if you like tech studies!
I love haunting quotes at the opening of novels; they serve to ground the story—like a song referenced within another song—in our existant reality, even if it is a wildly fantastic tale.
But unless you purposely flip back to refresh yourself, you’ll only see the quote before you begin the text. It will be completely shorn of context. That can add to the mystique, but likely it just dooms the quote to bemusing irrelevance or—dare I say—complete ignominy.
But it you were forced to view the epigraph every time you open the book (like during the opening of the 1998 PC game Baldur’s Gate) the frequency may etch the words themselves onto your brain. I vividly recall “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster...when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you…” and you’re going to fight monsters, so it seems pretty straightforward. Then it turns out you are one of a dozen demigod offspring of the deceased god of murder, catalyst for his inevitable rebirth and...well, don’t turn into the next god of death, okay? Right, so we’ve agreed, it was the perfect quote. It was also sixteen-year-old Dave’s first brush with Nietzsche, so thanks for that, Black Isle Studios!
Track Changes has an epigraph, too, so I was instantly in love: “Well, salvage whatever you can, threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection.” I am steeped more than most in the ephemeral nostalgia of bygone tech—time spent listening to Retronauts and Pixelated Audio, watching Lo-fi Let’s Plays, and reading I AM ERROR or GAMELIFE all function as the nerd-edition of Proust’s madeleine. While the TRS-80 and the TI-99/4A have become as familiar to me as the Master System, I don’t know the equivalent Video Game History Foundation for non-game machines. That is why I picked up Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. And I was not disappointed.
I liked the subject matter but was not prepared to discover (and fall in love with) a whole new structure:
I have therefore adopted a reverse chronological trajectory, generally working backward in time with my chapters. This maneuver, sometimes identified with what is called media archaeology, helps me avoid the temptation of lapsing into easy or self-fulfilling narratives of technological progress while simultaneously exposing the inherent strangeness of “word processing” through its increasingly remote—rather than increasingly familiar—incarnations.
This is far and away the most revelatory thing that I learned. Prior to this, my only real chronological survey was (surprise, surprise) Chrontendo, a video chronology of all Nintendo 8-bit games. I cannot help but now wonder how being able to structure historical narratives in a way to “help avoid the temptation of lapsing into easy of self-fulfilling narratives of technological progress” alter the feel of the work. Perhaps I am still in the honeymoon phase of this format, as this is my first brush with it, but I feel like it might enliven Talking Simpsons, and alleviate the worry of finishing the first half-dozen good seasons and being mired in the dregs of nostalgia-less modernity. Dark Money, which I am currently reading, shepherds the reader towards a future from which they cannot escape, the doom palpable as wave after wave of money buffets the system, breaking it down into our known dystopic present.
The reason studies like Track Changes are so important to read and understand isn’t because of all the cool facts—though there are plenty:
ASCII, the international standard of binary numbers designating various alphanumeric signs, was originally designed for use with teletype machines, and so to this day includes seven-bit codes dedicated to vestigial hardware features such as the ringing of the terminal bell. (The initial choice of seven bits for the electronic alphabet was—at least according to one account—a concession to the tensile strength of paper.)
It is important because the book gives historical context to technology without sanctifying or demonizing its use. Knowing what happened and why divorced from overt ideological leanings leads to recognition of the word processor as both artifact and deconstructed synecdoche for writing en masse. And due to the format choice of reverse chronology in Track Changes, even unintentional technological-utopian futurist ideologies are removed.
The book also helped release me from fear that references to “pop” culture are somehow diminutive to “real” culture. Citing books, literary reviews, and authorial biographies still seem cultured to me, while linking to Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year Awards does not. But facts and reality don’t follow the clean lines of what is couth. Take, for example, a few competing theories of the lengthening of the novel:
Similarly, it is a commonly held belief across a number of different genres that novels became noticeably longer after the advent of word processing. But it is important to remember that the marketplace for science fiction (and other genres) was changing rapidly during the 1980s, and in addition to the rise of chain bookstores and the newfound demand for best-sellers came the popularity of film and television tie-ins, especially in the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises….such questions seem to me impossible to adjudicate without focused biographical and critical scrutiny, and I am suspicious of any claims to account for broad shifts in literary trends solely through technological factors.
Then take this headline from 2013: Children’s reading shrinking due to apps, games and YouTube, contrast it with 2014’s Millenials Are Out-Reading Older Generations, and realize in forty years the internet—like word processors were—will be the tech blamed for whatever is the prevailing narrative at the time. Track Changes adds perspective. It brings its “threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection” to an increasingly ephemeral world of computer history.