Barely a week into online school and my children have done more video conferencing than I have in my entire life. Though I try not to leer in the background as they fire up another session, I can tell they’re already adept. Heck, they already know to mute their line when not talking. 

At least we have the internet, I thought the other day, while staring at a bird hop blamelessly from branch to branch. That’s the first time I’ve been actively grateful for the internet in ages. I don’t feel comfortable making predictions in any direction regarding what life will be like Afterward. But since adults have complained since time immemorial that what students learned in school wasn’t directly applicable to “real life,” this sudden lurch into online shoestring interconnectivity means that the kids have rapidly surpassed even the most utilitarian parents’ wildest dreams.

Not long ago I remember a school administrator discussing typing skills. He said he felt a little sheepish teaching middle schoolers typing when they would just be speaking into their computers within a couple of years. I was shocked. Surely not. The future is great and everything, but surely the kids cannot surpass typing, my most cherished adult-level skill. 

Typing is almost pure pleasure, the closest physical analogue I have to thinking itself. The only other activity that is nearly thought-adjacent might be walking. But then of course it’s difficult to type while walking, so you have to walk back to the house quickly in order to get those already fleeting thoughts down. Writing by hand is also pleasurable, to be sure, but it’s more physically difficult. And then you are left with such a mess. The almost instantaneous amalgamation of near-coherence that one gets from typing is decadently profound. Even crap drafts look good. And it’s not just the physio-mental activity itself that’s pleasurable. (Apple committed hubris when, in an effort to increase its laptops’ thinness, it introduced the butterfly keyboard, which frequently broke. It made typing — on a laptop! its primary mode of input! — more difficult.) Thinking in written language is fundamentally different than thinking in speech. I don’t want to belabor the idea that writing-thought is stronger than speaking-thought (though it is), but that these are two different skills and lead to different kinds of thought. Literature changed, of course, when the typewriter was introduced and then again when the word processor (still such an odd phrase) was introduced, and it will change yet again when our speech can be instantaneously transcribed. (Cue up ye olde anecdote about Henry James’s late period.) I don’t want to stand across the river of language and yell stop, necessarily, but I do want to recognize the private constructedness baked into the very act of writing prose, as opposed to the performative expectations built into the speech act. Perhaps it’s simply quieter, with all of the epistemological complications. Besides, people who talk aloud to themselves are rightly thought nutso.

I agree there are benefits to all this instant video chatting. My kids can see their teachers and buddies quickly and at scale. For a generation that never really made phone calls, they seem useful. Perhaps this social lacuna we’re experiencing will bring back the old-fashioned phone call, long thought outmoded, but like typing perhaps still useful. I remember phone calls in 8th grade that consisted entirely of me and my interlocutor listening to each other breathe. This was called flirting. 

I was on a video chat the other day and I became distracted by the small pane filled with my face. Is this what people see of me every day? This guy with the giant forehead and pore-ridden nose? Is this how I appear? One benefit of a day without video conferencing is that I go through vast stretches of time without being confronted with the burden of my own face. That’s not to say that I’m not vain, self-conscious, peacockish when given the chance, a gaping wound of ego constantly starved for attention. It’s just that I’m a little less these things when I’m not confronted twice an hour by my own face. 

We’re besotted with faces already anyway. The emotions of entire nations tip on the demeanor communicated by the national equivalent of a conference call. Speaking extemporaneously in an entertaining manner is no way to run a country. And hopefully school won’t devolve into a CNN panel discussion, the teacher just an emcee, a sheep in Wolf Blitzer’s clothing. Prose is a more efficient means of information transmission. It’s more difficult to create. (So much easier just to talk and talk and talk.) But it blesses the reader with perspective, time, and silence. And it weeds out some of the bullshitters. 

I heard my son talking to a computer the other day. “Google Silver Surfer,” he said. 

“Type it in!” I hollered from the other room. “Practice your spelling by typing it in!” 

When I made it around the corner he looked at me like I was crazy.