What A Computer Keyboard Teaches Us About Resistance To Change

Photo Credit: Diorama Sky

Computers have become an essential part of our lives. From creating documents to paying bills to connecting with friends online, the personal computer has entrenched itself into the everyday lives of billions of people across the globe.

But it hasn't always been this way. When I was in college, hardly any of my peers owned a personal computer. I usually walked over to the computer lab on campus when I had a paper due and, on a few occasions, used the PC of the one guy on my dorm floor who owned one. But I also frequently used my roommates typewriter. I would venture to say that most young people of day have never even seen a typewriter, much less used one.

But before the advent of the personal computer, most of us used typewriters. MentalFloss.com, a website with a wealth of trivia and obscure history facts, recently offered a fascinating history of the typewriter, the creation of the "QWERTY" keyboard and why our insistence of staying with what we're used to may be hindering our progress.

Mental Floss provides the background:

On the QWERTY layout (the modern keyboard layout, based on the first six letters of the top letter row):

"Christopher Sholes was primarily responsible for QWERTY, but it took years of tinkering to arrive at the layout we know today. The first model that Sholes built mimicked a piano keyboard, with the letters placed alphabetically. By the time the machines began to be mass-produced in the 1870s, the QWERTY keyboard was almost identical to the one in front of you."

On whether there is any evidence that the QWERTY layout is the most effective

"Not a shred. In fact, all evidence points to QWERTY being terribly inefficient. The most accessible row of the keyboard is the second, or ‘home’ row. So it would make sense if the most commonly used letters in the English language were there, right? But that’s not how QWERTY rolls. About 70% of words in English can be typed with the letters DHIATENSOR, yet only 4 of those 10 letters fall on QWERTY’s home row. The letter A falls on the home row (the only vowel to do so), but it must be struck with what is for most typists the weakest finger — the left pinky."

On why an inefficient layout was created:

"To slow down fast typists. Sounds ridiculous, right? But that’s the consensus among historians. On earlier arrangements of the keys, ones where the most commonly used letters were more sensibly placed on the home row, typists could get on a real roll, even when using the hunt and peck method. The problem with that? With all the popular letters close together, the keys got jammed. The typist had to stop to un-jam them. What made that worse was that in the earliest models of the typewriter, the keys struck the back of the paper, so the typist was unable to see jams — and the resulting mistakes — until the page was removed from the machine. Slowing the typist down a bit by dispersing the most commonly used letters all over the keyboard was preferable to wasting even more time because of jammed keys."

On why the Dvorak Keyboard, a more efficient layout of the keys, isn't more broadly accepted:

"Same reason we don’t use the metric system. We embrace its inefficiency and prefer it to the pain of switching to something better. By the time the DSK was introduced in 1932, several generations of typists had been using QWERTY. It was by far the most readily available layout, and the one that was taught in most typing schools. So even after technological advances solved the key jamming issue, we kept the relic of the problem – the QWERTY keyboard."

Because we're all used to typing in a certain manner and those of us that are trained typists are comfortable with a keyboard, we are resistant to change. Even when the keyboards that many of us spend hours on each day were specifically designed to slow us down, we still go with the flow.

I can't help but make some connections between the keyboard and Christian ministry.  Like the keyboard that was created ages ago for reasons limited to its time, many methods of ministry continue in widespread use because it is what we are used to and what we've been trained in.  Whether it impacts a new generation of people is really not that important because it's what we know and we go with what we know. 

For example, there are ministries that still distribute messages on tape -- producing cassette tapes and video tapes of sermons -- for a culture that consumes digital forms of media.  There are churches that don't have a website -- when not having a website means to many seekers that you don't even exist. The resistance to new forms of communication and technology will be (and is) the death knell for untold numbers of ministries.

Sure, we can all get our work done with a QWERTY keyboard.  It may not be as efficient as other layouts but we'll eventually get what we think we want.  We're comfortable with the results.  I wonder in what ways we could do ministry differently that would feel awkward and uncomfortable at first but would lead to a greater effectiveness in the mission God has called us to.  I thank God for my peers that are willing to be the Dvoraks of the world!

Those Were the Days

I was visiting some of our campus chapters last week in the Midwest and while sitting in the University of Missouri student union with one of our student leaders, Evan, he asked me what things were like when I was in college (1991-1995). I told him that students were the same and professors were probably much the same, but the major difference was how technology rules the lives of students these days.

When I was a student in the early nineties, nobody had a cell phone (thus no text messaging), the Internet wasn't well-known (thus no Facebook, instant messaging or blogs) and if you wanted to listen to music on the way to class you had to carry around a bulky cassette tape player (since iPods were years away from being invented). If you wanted to write to friends back home you had to actually get out a pen and paper and "snail mail" the letter. Hardly anyone had a personal computer so you had to walk over to the computer lab whenever a paper was due. Or you might be able to do it on your typewriter if it was too snowy to walk to the lab.

We played Super Tecmo Bowl on our NES in our room or watched videos on MTV (when they actually played music videos). To register for classes each semester we had to dial in on the rotary phone in our dorm room and get put on hold for up to 30-45 minutes at a time hoping you could get into the classes you needed. Calls home to parents were pretty infrequent with no privacy at all as roommates sat there listening to your calls. If you needed to find information, you went to the library or looked in phone book.

So, yes technology has changed things a lot. One of my favorite columnists, Craig Wilson of USA Today, wrote about how cell phones have changed things for today's students. You can read the whole column here, but I particularly liked this portion:

"A friend confessed the other day that she talks to her son who is away at college five or six times a day. At least I think she said five or six times a day. I could hardly hear her over the roar of her helicopter.

Does she call to wake him up? Do they talk after every class? Does he call when he's heading to lunch? Does she call after lunch and ask what he had for lunch? Maybe he calls during lunch to ask what he should have for lunch. Who knows?

All I know is it's too much information.

What's the point of being away at college if your parents know everything that's going on? That used to be the whole point, didn't it? Your parents didn't have a clue what was happening on campus. I think even they liked it that way. The less known, the better."

Like I said, I think college students are actually no different than a generation ago or even a couple generations ago. They still dream, they hope, they get into trouble and they face a scary world. But a lot of those conversations that used to happen face-to-face now take place in t9 language or on a Facebook wall. And if that sentence doesn't make sense, maybe you can Skype a teenager next door to have them explain it.