That the capybara-the world’s largest rodent, native to South America, a kind of pig-sized cross between a rat and a buffalo-dominates users’ imaginations is both indisputable and inscrutable. The most complete list of possible Google Doc animals ever chronicled is as follows: alligator, anteater, armadillo, auroch, axolotl, badger, bat, beaver, buffalo, camel, capybara, chameleon, cheetah, chinchilla, chipmunk, chupacabra, cormorant, coyote, crow, dingo, dinosaur, dog, dolphin, dragon, duck, dumbo octopus, elephant, ferret, fox, frog, giraffe, gopher, grizzly, hedgehog, hippo, hyena, jackal, ibex, ifrit, iguana, koala, kraken, lemur, leopard, liger, lion, llama, manatee, mink, monkey, narwhal, nyan cat, orangutan, otter, panda, penguin, platypus, pumpkin, python, quagga, rabbit, raccoon, rhino, sheep, shrew, skunk, slow loris, squirrel, tiger, turtle, unicorn, walrus, wolf, wolverine, wombat. Or, put another way: do capybaras have nightmares? A real plunge into Google Docs would concern itself with superstition and paranoia, our medieval hearts palpitating against the frosted glass of the digital future. However, it left the app’s mental cartography-its psychic zoo space-unperturbed. Yes, it discussed a word-processing program with multiple-editor capabilities. Writing the piece was pleasurable because it involved talking to many nice and interesting people and looking at a lot of capybaras online.īut that article was not actually about Google Docs. It strolled blithely through a zoo full of “anonymous animals,” as they are known, which replace usernames when groups work on a Google Doc anonymously. My essay raised chewy questions about the nature of authorship, and whether good writing can happen by committee, and how much people should think about their audience when they craft prose. My sister, Emmy Waldman, riffed on the “differently colored text cursors dancing or racing” in a game of intellectual bumper cars she described the “cheerfully blinking sign of someone else’s attention,” which made the solitary sentence production of her English dissertation feel more like a multiplayer jaunt through virtual reality. (Suggest, never delete.) Bridesmaids touted the glories of the collaborative seating chart. (Oops.) Graduate students, in such fields as linguistics and psychology, revealed unwritten codes of conduct for group projects in Google Docs. In some tidy corner of my Drive sits a draft studded with useful anecdotes, illustrating what it is like to type while your boss watches, to receive e-mail notifications every time a reader inserts a comment, and to send an automated message to your editor (accidentally!) informing her that you have rejected all seventy-four of her changes. It wrote itself as a reported article, in which I spoke to friends and colleagues about their mixed experiences with the free word-processing program. This is a piece that wrote and unwrote itself in Google Docs.
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