QWERTY Forever

In a world of abstract interfaces and algorithmic text prediction, some prefer typing on an analog keyboard as a way to remain connected to their labor.

By Hannah Frishberg

The first thing I do when I open my laptop every weekday morning is take a free online typing test on 10fastfingers.com. The timer starts when I press any key on my keyboard, and for one minute exactly I focus all of my attention on accurately typing the random words — spell, American, book, tree, cut, large, young, life, all, girl, high — that appear on my screen as fast as I can. My high score is 132 words per minute. On a bad day, when I’m tired or distracted, I’ll score in the low one hundreds. Sometimes, I take the test on my phone. I generally text at about 70 words per minute.

When my nails grow out, my score drops slightly. When I work on my desktop computer, taking a typing test helps me gauge how dirty the keyboard is, and if I need to thwack it against the side of my desk to dislodge bagel crumbs. I generally type faster after a good keyboard thwacking.

Every day, I rank within the top 10 typists on the site, which has a slick, web 1.0 interface that offers a leaderboard, the test itself, and little else. This is a small victory, a skill that’s rarely relevant to share, but it makes me highly efficient at transcribing phone interviews while I’m talking and writing copy as fast as I think it. It also helps me focus.

I’ve always enjoyed taking typing tests because I am good at them. They warm up my fingers for a day of writing, get me in tune with my mental state and briefly require that I do not multitask. I barely even think as I reflexively type the words on the screen.

Such a direct action feels foreign from the rest of my day. The pace of digital existence has made typing a necessary skill, but it’s separated from the product it creates. It’s not calligraphy or penmanship; it’s not even cursive. Although It is a foundational element of making online content, it is not seen as a process, nor is it commonly used as a verb, “to type.” It is a uniform action, one that implies creation but not thought. You don’t type a tweet, or an Instagram caption — you write them, because as no two people’s handwriting are the same, neither are any two people’s internet voice. With typing, the only variable is speed.

***

When my grandmother was my age, she was a secretary, and she used shorthand. A virtually dead form of communication I have never seen beyond her illegible refrigerator notes, shorthand is a system of symbols for abbreviating spoken language widely used a few decades ago. The concept of shortening written language is centuries old, dating back to the ancient Greeks, but the version of shorthand my Nanni knows was developed by English educator Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837. A phonetic system of strikes and squiggles, Pitman shorthand can express entire paragraphs of text in a handful of strokes. It is incredibly efficient and, by virtue of the fact that so few people can read it, save some secretaries and court reporters, works like encryption.

Like my grandmother, I love efficient forms of writing. I’ve been taking typing tests regularly since middle school, when my homeroom teacher would gather my classmates and I in the computer lab and teach us to memorize the keyboard with a Mavis Beacon-knockoff program we’d play on aquarium-blue MacBooks. I was very fast, and started challenging my friends to Typer Shark competitions, which I would always win. People stopped accepting my challenges.

Mere existence in our tech-infused world taught my 18-year-old sister the QWERTY ways through osmosis, without a typing program. “I learned how to touch type in like sixth grade by continuous exposure to typing,” she tells me over Facebook Messenger, our main medium for digital communication since we both type faster than we text.

These days, you don’t necessarily have to type much at all — texts aggressively autocorrect and technology uses predicted sentences to prompt communication. Algorithms know what our fingers want and can write it faster. Some people find it easier to speak to their phone and let it transcribe their texts. Robots are doing the typing for us now, although their reliability remains limited.

Yet, the demand for mechanical keyboards and retro typewriters shows that even digital natives miss tactile interfaces. (It helps that newer keypads tend to be buggier than their old-school counterparts.) While T9 flip phone keyboards were an inefficient hellscape, the loss of the physical phone keyboard was widely mourned when it was displaced by the touch-screen smartphone, starting with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

“Literally everyone I know said they miss the physical keyboard when they saw I had a BlackBerry,” Larissa, an events coordinator who only begrudgingly got an iPhone 8 after her 3-year-old KEYone model took a swim last month, tells me. She’s also seen fellow fans wax nostalgic for tactile keyboards on the BlackBerry enthusiast forums she occasionally visits. BlackBerry-branded phones are likely not long for this world, however — their largest manufacturer will halt sales this summer.

***

I refused to relinquish my own tactile keyboard for years after most of my friends got smartphones, remaining loyal to the LG Lotus, a strange little flippable square covered in itty bitty flowers and swirls which also had a full, miniature QWERTY keyboard. The phone didn’t have internet, but for me, physical keys were more important.

The problem with the Lotus was that when it reached the end of its life, it had a tendency to snap in half. By the time my third model snapped, the model had been discontinued, so I held onto its broken shell as long as I could, the wires connecting the two sides dangling between them as I made calls, holding one half of the phone in each hand. During this time, I frequently electrocuted my face. I bought a real smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S6, in 2015.

My Lotus made me feel proud of my tiny hands, which are well proportioned for physical keyboards, desktop or mobile. My fingers lie nearly flat when typing, and I don’t face the problem of smashing the wrong letter on my phone.

In 2012, my friend Sinan had the Verizon Wireless Juke, a music-oriented flip phone with a laughably teeny T9 keyboard. Sinan has massive hands, and he could press every key with just his thumb. The keys were so small that he needed to perform a pinky-tip ballet in order to send legible texts. He now has a keyboard-less smartphone, but he misses his Juke.

“At least the keys on the Juke had partitions and tactile feedback,” he tells me. “I used to be able to feel around a keypad and type, now I mistype all the time. Also my fingers are still too fucking big for the tiny key partitions on a smartphone.”

As technology becomes faster, more efficient, and designed to eliminate the need for human input, I find the analog nature of typing increasingly appealing. It is one vestige of the manual process that links me with what I put online. There is still a keyboard on my phone and most of the apps I use feature some kind of typing feature, but many also offer the ability to endlessly click and scroll. When I take my morning typing tests, though, I am briefly able to enjoy a world where the only scroll is a random string of context-free words.

---