Twenty-six Ways of Looking at a BlackBerry by John Simmons

Author:John Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781408105962
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Constraint 17: Written for an eight year old on a BlackBerry®

When an eight year old of today enters the business world in a decade or two, he or she will have grown up with the technology that is still something of a novel torture for me today. As I sat typing out that message on the BlackBerry® , a painstaking task for me, an eight year old might have been a blur of fingers and thumbs over an equivalent device. Like Edward Scissorhands without the sharp edges.

We all need to be aware of how fast technology is changing everything. Even the medium I am now writing for – this printed book – will be changed radically during that eight year old’s lifetime. The Internet has already changed the way we read and also the way we write books. A book like this has been influenced by the Internet, becoming more episodic and less linear than it might have been a couple of decades ago. And, inevitably, we grow older, and as we grow older we find new technologies racing away from our comprehension.

In 2007 I went to the Barbican in London to see the 72-year-old singer and poet Leonard Cohen talk with the composer Philip Glass before a performance. Here were two heroes of mine on stage but it was Leonard Cohen who charmed the audience with dry but warm wit. Asked by a member of the audience if he had any words of advice on growing old, he replied: ‘Oh yes, lots. But none that comes to mind.’

As you grow older there are compensations, but it’s always worth putting yourself, as far as you can, into the minds of younger people. So that is one useful challenge that comes with this constraint of rewriting the base text for an eight year old. It’s a challenge to the imagination that is as useful for a 20 year old as for a 70 year old. But the other discovery that comes naturally with the constraint is the one I referred to in the first paragraph, and it’s simply to do with the writing method. Using a tiny (in my eyes) BlackBerry® keypad changes your writing style towards a direction dictated both by the technology and by the intended audience for this version of the base text. Towards simplification. The limitations imposed drive the writer towards using fewer words but not necessarily greater meaning. It becomes harder to develop a deeper thought because you are consciously rationing your words.

Something else happens too. The effect of writing as if to an eight year old is to reduce the message to its essentials – but it also forces a leap to imagine the world through the eyes of someone very different from yourself. Even though we’ve all been an eight-year-old child, it was probably some time ago – the act of remembering is not easy. But memory and imagination are like twin siblings. Sometimes we remember what we are actually imagining, or we imagine what we think we are remembering.

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