“You don’t know what hard work is like”: pre-Internet writing and collaboration

Quick post because am supposed to be doing other things, which scare me and I am (obviously) doing displacement activities, albeit Worthy Ones.

We people who have spent most of our lives in/of the Internet (and full disclosure, I am 50:50) have no real understanding of just how much boring physical work went in to writing/researching/dissemination in the before times (PCs came in in the mid-1980s, the “Internet” didn’t really take off until late 1990s).

Three examples

1. I remember talking with someone who typed up her husband’s book in the 1970s, and just how LONG it took, and how she could see from his initial type-up where he had been repeating himself just to ‘keep the flow’ going while typing (“All work and no play…”

2. Norman Finkelstein berating pro-Palestine students in Manchester (2009? 2010?) for not having read then then-recent Goldstone report, explaining to them how much mundane physical effort he and colleagues had had to undertake in the 1970s and 1980s – photocopying, index cards, mailing stuff etc etc. (The students weren’t happy being told they were lazy!)

3. And I’ve just read this from Brian Martin, about the work involved in “Nuclear Knights.” Representative paragraph –

I typeset the manuscript on the compositor of the ANU Students’ Association, spending about one hour per day after Peta Watt finished work, over a period of six weeks. Essentially the compositor typed directly onto a sheet of paper. Mistakes caught immediately could be fixed with opaquing fluid. For more serious blunders, the incorrect word, line or paragraph had to be retyped separately and laid on top of the incorrect text. To avoid this, I typed very slowly and carefully. By doing the typesetting myself, there was no need to prepare a second draft readable to anyone but me.

So much of the drudgery has been taken out of producing texts and similarly from research (digital archives are great!).

But somehow we (well, I, at least) haven’t become productive. Perhaps because the same tools that speed the possibility also provide both distractions-a-million, but also other new shiny projects etc that one could be doing…)