ABSTRACT
Comparing handwriters to typists, or the makers of prehistoric hand axes to the push-button operators of the parquet flooring machine, scholors might suppose that the overall trend of technological progress has been from hands to fingertips. The button-pushing finger which operates the automatic machine is part of a hand that, although still anatomically human, has lost something of its humanity. The typewriter, according to poet Billy Collins, does something similar, breaking up the flow of manual gesture and the corresponding letter line into discrete and momentary 'hits', only to reassemble them as an articulation of jointed segments. The drift of technological enhancement has been for the haptic to give way to the optical, in the registers of touch as well as vision. It has been to substitute touch sensitivity at the fingertips for the sentient correspondence of telling by hand.
