By Makau Kitata
In an age when we constantly stare at phone screens and let algorithms think for us, the writer faces a new kind of fear—one I have personally experienced.
Last week, a colleague confiscated a student’s phone during an exam. The girl collapsed instantly, as if he had snatched away her oxygen mask. We rushed her to the hospital in an ambulance, sirens piercing through the campus air. Watching her tremble on the stretcher, I realised how completely the device had fused with her sense of being.
So, when I walked into class without my phone—having lost my laptop and phone to thieves during my morning commute—I finally understood the horror of writing without the comfort of technology.
The mind goes blank.
A prompt is always at hand—Write this. Try that. Autocorrect? —a companion that never allows true silence. We no longer walk; we navigate websites. We no longer observe people; we watch short videos of strangers gossiping, twerking, confessing. And we don’t laugh; we consume canned laughter and convince ourselves we are amused.
Without the laptop and phone in my pocket, my chest tightened as I headed to teach creative writing. Panic set in—the kind that shrinks the stomach into a hard, painful fist. But I had already packed some printed handouts, so I trudged to class feeling strangely naked, like someone forced to walk across the market with bare buttocks.
As I walked, I remembered Professor Okoth. When I once complained of writer’s block while working on my thesis, he adjusted his tie, stared down at me over his spectacles, and said, “Last Man, put your ass down and write!”
He spoke with his characteristic chuckle, as though words tickled him, but the sentence still echoes in my mind like a wall clock.
In class, I had asked students to bring printed copies of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They arrived instead holding up phones like digital passports, staring at me as if I belonged to a bygone age. When I said, “Underline the repeated phrase,” they froze.
“We… can’t underline on a phone,” one whispered.
“And neither can you write annotations on the text as you read,” I observed.
So, I played them a video using one of their laptops. They loved King’s charisma, the applause, the crescendo of emotion. But when I asked them to trace the flow of ideas, they struggled. Only the few who shared printed copies managed it.
Watching them lean over the pages, pen tips tapping, I realised something simple: paper anchors thought. It connects the learner to the old art.
Writing, like King’s march to the steps of the Mall, demands legwork. Physicality. The magic of handwriting, the rustle of paper, the pressure on fingers, the spine straight over a notebook. Soft copy, alone, makes us soft.
As I left the classroom, I met Professor Emeritus Henry in the corridor. After I told him about the lesson, he sighed and said, “Technology has killed the essay.” He shook his head beneath two blinking Wi-Fi routers overhead.
I tried to reassure him. “Those who refuse to adapt will become extinct. Look at Kamau—the retired teacher who began his project 10 years ago, before you retired. Still no email, no laptop. If he updates himself, he’ll finish that PhD.”
But as the professor walked away, doubt crept in. Maybe extinction isn’t the real danger. Maybe losing the slow gaze, the still moment, the hand gripping a pen—that is the quiet catastrophe.
Later, walking to the electronics shop with my colleague Tom, the thought returned. “Tom,” I said, “technology may demand that we spend and adapt, but I think writing still asks something older.” I winced at the thought of buying new devices.
Tom laughed and swung the shop door open. “Stop grumbling and buy the gadgets,” he said. Then he added, “The question is simple: are you ready to stop whining—and sit down, and write?”
