the blank page

3 months ago

for all of the power of computers, it’s remarkable how much effort we need to invest in order to them to even approximate the robust usefulness and flexibility of piece of paper.

you can draw; you can perform and describe complex calculations; you can write in your journal about your dog; and you can relate all of these things spatially on the page. all you need is a pencil (or pen) and a piece of paper. something similar can be said of whiteboards, with the added nuances of being tuned for social and collaborative contexts (scale and ease of removing marks).

but is it really true that that’s “all you need?”

in each of these scenarios, a person is not simply engaging with one technology (the page), but instead a complex of technologies, working together in unison. in terms of physical technologies, you have an instrument with which to make marks, a surface on which marks can be made, both of which have been engineered iteratively over the span of thousands of years, and which each carry a certain basic intended interaction logic (how to hold a pencil, how to make marks on a page).

there are also crucial layers of symbolic and linguistic technologies at work. you are not born with the ability to write about math on a piece of paper. you have to understand and know what a pencil is, what paper is, how to use language, how to write it, how to understand and represent mathematical concepts, and so on.

this is the true power of paper: to provide a surface onto which other linguistic and representational technologies can operate, realized through the interaction between the page, the user, and their learned knowledge and systems of representation.

it requires years to schooling and training to make “effective” use of paper in this aforementioned use case. think about how much time and labor our society invests in helping people gradually building the language with which to interact with it.

that said, paper and pencil do not actually require any a priori knowledge to use. because they are physical objects, they can be understood, used, and recontextualized via direct manipulation. when specifically thinking about functional fixedness vs flexibility, this is undoubtedly one of its greatest assets over a purely digital technology. a toddler can grab onto a crayon and start making marks on a page—or they could stick it in their nose. paper can be folded into a paper plane, torn up to decorate a christmas tree, or rolled up and used as a telescope.

all of these things owe to the objectness of paper and pencil. when you strip away all of the symbolic and semantic systems often ascribed to their use, paper and pencil are simply things, without context, that could be reused or repurposed in any way. in the end, it is actually the way paper and pencil build on the fundamental primitives of interacting with physical objects that grants them such flexibility. making marks on a page can actually be discovered without knowing how to write, and yet is this core skill that permeates practically all conventional interactions with the page.