What Should We Be Worried About?

LOSING TOUCH

CHRISTINE FINN

Archaeologist, journalist; author, Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley

My worry? Losing touch.

Biologists at the University of Newcastle, U.K., recently published a report claiming that fingers wrinkling in a long bath was a sign of evolutionary advantage. The prunelike transformation provided the digits with a better grip. More than helping one to grasp the soap, this skin puckering suggested itself as a factor for survival, as our Mesolithic ancestors foraged for food in rivers and rock pools.

That widely reported reminder of our evolved capabilities helped assuage my own real worry—call it, perhaps, a haptical terror—about losing touch with the physical world. What is the future for fingers, as tools, in the Digital Age? Now that the latest interface is a touch that is smooth and feather-light, and human-to-machine commands are coming to be spoken, or breathed, or blinked, or even transmitted by brain waves, will finger-work be the preserve solely of artists and child’s-play? Fingers could still form churches and steeples and all the peoples, be in the play of poets, peel an orange. But in the Digital Age, will there be pages still to turn, tendrils to be untangled, a place for hard keystrokes, not simply passing swipes? After all, the digit, birthmarked with its unique code, is our security guard, a hush as much as the finger placed to the mouth.

But the fingers are fighting back.

We are encouraged to wield kitchen tools, find grandma’s sewing box. To beat eggs, pound dough, and ice cakes; to join knitting circles; to plunge our hands into landscape to pick wild food. Things are still palpable; real book sales are encouraging, and we are still hooked on marginalia and turning down the corner of a page.

A few months ago, I visited the Florida house where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums in an ecstatic burst of typing over eleven days and nights. In this refuge from New York critics of On the Road, his fingers translated brain to hand to brain, synapses sizzling from caffeine and Benzadrine. In these wooden rooms nearly sixty years later could be heard the distinctive sound of a metal typewriter. Not Jack’s ghost pounding out but the latest writer-in-residence, a young woman in her twenties who, it transpired, had arrived from Ohio with both a laptop and a vintage manual typewriter, to know what it felt like.

This essay began with the proverbial note sketched out by hand on the back of an envelope. My fingers then picked out the words on my smartphone. My worry had been that these two processes, necessary to shape and synthesize, were somehow conflicted. I worried about our grip on technology. But the wrinkling of our fingers reminds me that we engage with the evolved and the still evolving.