Shall we soon finally see the demise of the QWERTY keyboard—that 136-year-old artifact of the predigital world that has defined the way users of the English language envision and feel words in space? In “The Promise and Peril of ‘Smart’ Keyboards,” an article she wrote for the August 13, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan says that this might happen sooner than we think.
Heffernan bases this personal forecast on her recent observation that although the QWERTY layout still appears in nearly all English-language computer hardware keyboards, “smartphones and tablet devices with touch-screen keypads (like the Android and the iPhone) now default to a layout that looks like qwerty but doesn’t work like qwerty at all.” This, she says, “will be good news to many designers who believe that bullheaded commitment to qwerty is holding up a revolution in interface design that should have started with the touch screen.”
As she ponders the likely demise of the QWERTY keyboard, Heffernan muses: “Who knows what qwerty has done to the language — even to modes of thought — by attaching meaning to certain constellations? Deep in our typist-minds, G and H are centrally located and somehow siblings; X and Z are southwestern outliers; and Q is always followed by . . . W.” Then, on a personal note, she recalls her own excitement and unease over the shift to what she calls a “gut-renovated qwerty.”
Read Virginia Heffernan’s “The Promise and Peril of ‘Smart’ Keyboards” in The New York Times now!RELATED READING:In “The Internet: Is it changing the way we think?”, John Naughton of
The Observer in the UK offers his comments and has put together the opinions of eight writers and experts on the subject, namely Sarah Churchwell, academic and critic; Naomi Alderman, novelist; Ed Bullmore, psychiatrist; Geoff Dyer, writer; Colin Blakemore, neurobiologist; Ian Goodyer, psychiatrist; Maryanne Wolf, cognitive neuroscientist; and Bidisha, writer and critic. They are responding to the provocative claim of Nicholas Carr in his book
The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember that the Internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains as well.
Read John Naughton’s “The internet: is it changing the way we think?” in The Observer now!
