Before the entire front of a phone became a screen, one had to use a keypad to input anything, so I had no choice but to use the Cheonjiin keyboard. My phone used Cheonjiin, but each manufacturer had its own system for combining Korean consonants and vowels within the range of the number pad. In the very early days of PCS phones, one sometimes had to move a cursor from left to right and select consonants and vowels, but as mobile phones spread explosively, these not-quite-tricks soon appeared. It was probably also a strategy by manufacturers: once one’s hands became used to a system, the fact that one had to write with both thumbs made it hard to switch to another company’s phone. Rather than endure one’s Korean input speed dropping by more than half after changing phones, one would likely keep using the same company’s products.
The arrival of touch screens seems to have coincided with the time when internet browsers began to be used seriously on mobile phones. I vividly remember using Twitter on my first touch-screen phone. At that time, when using the internet, I even calculated the size of each page because of speed. I searched out and used mobile browsers with functions that would not load graphics on Twitter. Once the keypad disappeared, inputting letters without looking became impossible. And since the screen was not capacitive but had to be pressed with a fingernail, the input situation became completely different.
Because I had to look at the on-screen keyboard anyway to avoid typos, and because entering English through the old keypad method of pressing each key several times was too inconvenient, I had already changed to QWERTY. It was only a matter of time before I changed Korean input to QWERTY as well.
Still, that time came after I switched to an iPhone. My previous LG Argo phone seemed inaccurate when touched with a fingernail, so I used the stylus that came in the box. With that stylus, when writing Korean, using Cheonjiin was far more comfortable than bringing up a QWERTY keyboard and tapping it. QWERTY is hard to use when one stylus has to roam everywhere.
After switching to the iPhone, it was capacitive, like current phones, so it was not bad to type with my thumbs. At first I inevitably made typos, but once I became used to it, they soon decreased to the level of the Cheonjiin keypad. I had thought I was slower than others but made fewer typos because I do not write quickly to begin with, but later I learned that there were more people around me than I expected who typed very fast and still made fewer typos than I did.
For me, writing with two thumbs on a QWERTY keyboard and writing with ten fingers on a Bluetooth keyboard do not differ greatly in speed. A touch keyboard does not make me type especially fast, and I never tried to raise my characters per minute on a physical keyboard either. What matters more is not raw speed but whether the tool allows the thought to continue. If the hands become too conscious of themselves, the thought slows down. If the input feels natural enough to disappear, the writing can continue.
A phone is convenient because it is always with me. It is the tool that catches sentences that would otherwise be lost. But the phone is also the tool that most easily breaks concentration. Notifications, screen size, posture, battery, the feeling of holding it in both hands, all of these enter writing. With thumbs, the writing tends to be short, dense, and fragmentary. With five fingers on a keyboard, the writing stretches out more. It is not simply a difference in the number of fingers. It is a difference in the way the body enters the sentence.
That is why writing tools change the writing environment, and the writing produced within that environment also changes. To write with thumbs is to write while holding the sentence in front of one’s face. To write with five fingers is to place the sentence on a surface and walk along it. Neither is superior in every case. Some writings must be caught with thumbs before they evaporate. Others need five fingers, a desk, and a screen wide enough for the thought to breathe.
Looking back, the change from keypad to touch screen, from Cheonjiin to QWERTY, from thumbs to Bluetooth keyboard, was not merely a history of devices. It was a history of how my writing body changed. The writing did not come only from the head. It came through the thumb, the fingertip, the keyboard, the screen, and the posture. The tool made the route, and the route shaped the writing.
Original Korean article: 엄지와 다섯 손가락