Who Do You Trust?

In A Better Pencil, Chapter 7: Trust the Text, Dennis Baron discusses how society has evolved from distrusting anything written down to trusting nothing unless it is written down. I certainly believe this. If I read an article myself instead of just getting the rundown of it from a friend orally, I am more likely to trust the actual article than the words coming out of my friend's mouth (whether or not that says something about my relationships, I don't know). If I do not fully understand or think that what my friend claims is accurate, then I will look up the article and see for myself.

Baron has something that I disagree strongly, however: "while a handwritten text is as valid, legally, as anything typed or printed, today we are more likely to accept the writing of strangers if it's machine generated" (131).

This is not at all true for me. As Baron points out, it is much easier to forge something digitally than manually. He uses the example of photoshop, stating "computers allow us to manipulate images in ways that make forgery undetectable" (117) and "it's easy enough for an amateur to produce a fraudulent document, even a complex one, on a computer" (118). For me, I am much more likely to be skeptical over something on the internet than in my grandmother's chest in the attic. The reason for this is that it is more difficult to forge by hand. You have to be extremely skilled to paint a replica of the Mona Lisa that looks nearly undiscernibly like the original. As for handwriting, most people do not pay much attention to each other's. Even so, it is difficult to write the same exact way as someone else. Typed words look all the same; there aren't any loops, certain letters that connect, varying spaces, or anything else quirky and unique as an individual's handwriting.

 

Of course, this does not mean that everything handwritten is reliable-- quite the contrary.

"We still run into handwritten texts that may not record the past as it really is" (Baron 130).

You don't have to look deep into history to realize that many documents, even those written by those who experienced an event first hand, are littered with sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, ignorance, prejudice, limited knowledge of scientific fact, and much more. These documents do, however, teach us something about the time in which the author lived. That does not mean they are accurate, though. Baron is correct is claiming that handwriting can be deceiving, but I personally do not trust typed and/or printed documents over handwritten.

 

Here are some reasons (some of which I have already listed)

• It is much more difficult to copy another's handwriting precisely enough that professionals will not detect the forgery.
• When people write things down, they are doing so to say something. Facts can be checked. This, of course, can also be a downfall since lies abound on the internet.
• While the content of a document might be biased, it can reveal a lot about the "truths" of the time in which it was written.
• The "truths" of that time might be seen as obvious lies today, but in the historical period they are accounts of how people thought and what they believed. In regards to society's beliefs, structure, and worldview, this makes the document accurate.

So there's my spiel. Hope I got you thinking!

 

Bibliography: Baron, Dennis E. "Trusting the Text." A Better Pencil Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 113- 134. Print.