Then with better communications came more handwritings, and more distant situations. Then the typewriter, and then the dictatyper. Everybody's writing was just like everybody else's, and there was a lot of it.
Everything was in type, even the identifying name at the end of a personal letter, the autograph ("Signature," Sara snigged) ... signature, then. For a long time businessmen's letters had been signed by their stenographers anyway. ("Secretaries, blockhead," Sara muttered, and she sighed.)
The point is, I continued, that except for a few cases of eccentricity—I glanced at her belt pouch, with the pencil in it—handwriting had disappeared. The written word—the reader's distant experience—was in type: dictatype, teletype, phototype, printer's type ... newspapers, books, advertising, business letters, memoranda, personal letters, everything.
Before, people had tended to believe most of what was handwritten, and almost nothing that was in type. With everything in type, they got tired of deciding which to believe and began to believe either every word, or none. It wasn't good.
It led to the Edict, and of course to the World Press Association and its relentless search for truth.
"Gah," said Sara. "Truth is an overrated commodity. Let's go upstairs and get ourselves something to eat."
II
Her voice was muffled coming from the jon. But I knew she was reading from a document she kept framed there, and I knew well what it said.
The Edict