Julie and Julia: A case study in writing across eras

So, I have to admit that I was a little skeptical when I was asked to watch the movie Julie and Julia as a way of exploring the changing nature of writing.  However, the juxtaposed storylines following intrepid blogger Julie, and Julia Child, a woman who painstakingly types out drafts using carbon paper, work to illuminate the ways writing has changed as a result of the widespread introduction of personal computers, word processing programs, and the Internet. 

Julie sends emails; Julia handwrites letters, an act that somehow seems more intimate and personal.  Julie and Julia both write memoirs, but there is something more formal about Julia's and something much more colloquial about Julie's.  In fact, near the end of the film, there is something about Julie's vernacular informality that seems offensive or problematic for Julia; Julia seems to sense a disrespect on Julie's behalf that is probably more a product of the medium she is working in than it is a product of true disdain.  Both women type, but Julia's typing was necessarily more purposeful.  For her, there was no cut and paste, no easy press of the delete button; if you made a mistake, you had to start over. 

In thinking about how writing has changed, particularly from Julia's era to Julie's, perhaps the computer has made us lazier writers; we don't have to think as much anymore.  If we make a mistake, we can just backspace and re-type.  If we decide that one section of our text would work better somewhere else, cut and paste.  There's less forethought, less planning, because there are so many ways to mold our writing once it appears before us on the screen.

On the other hand, the digital age has made it easier, at least in the case of Julie vs. Julia, to get published.  The movie chronicles Julia Child's journey to get Mastering the Art of French Cooking published, a journey that took years.  In contrast, Julie begins blogging, and before a full year is up, she already has publishers and agents calling and offering book deals.  There's something much more instantaneous about writing in the digital age.

When writing is instantaneous, though, it tends to be much more careless.  Not only is it less planned out, but it is more likely to be riddled with typos and grammatical issues.  When people's fingers are flying across a computer keyboard, it's hard to take the time to consider a well-placed comma or whether to use then or than.  But maybe that doesn't matter quite so much because readers' eyes are flying across the screen at an equally high speed, skimming over the words instead of soaking them in, so maybe no one (no one but me) notices.