Imagine one day, as you type a sentimental text to your friend, your phone starts speaking. Along with fixing your grammar, it tells you which words to add to make your text sound more reasonable. As scary as the thought might seem, it is not entirely a delusion. Our keyboards understand our thought patterns and fill in every possible sentence we create, often suggesting emoticons we might want to include. Well, it would be great if they would auto-suggest our common app essays. Unfortunately, that’s not the case yet. 

As a dictionary defines it, a keyboard is an input device to enter characters and functions into a computer system. However, with the end of 8th-grade computer studies, we completely dissipated any technical knowledge associated with them. Since then, all we know of the keyboards is what we see daily: the virtual keyboard of our devices. In today’s world, there are more mobile phones than people. With every personal device, there is a unique and intimate story attached.

One would argue that a keyboard’s mere existence is limited to typing in data; we fail to recognize that keyboards narrate the tales of our daily lives. They are not as inanimate as we esteem them to be. Thanks to the technological revolution, we greatly rely on our keyboards such that they have replaced our journals: they hold the texts we fail to send, the notes we lock away in our phones, our likes, our esoteric desires, the searches that keep us up in the middle of the night, the last chapter we were struggling hard to cram and much more. 

Likewise, keyboards around the campus gave us colourful insight into the lives of our peers. Their keyboards were given the prompt, “I am like this because…” and the rest is as follows:

• “…the people who take the main event are going on a more objective and a dear to be the resistance.”
• “…I am not sure if you need help with anything.”
• “…I have a good sleep.”
• “…you aren’t.”
• “…of my dad lol.”
• “…I will not make it out of life alive.”
• “…I like mankind but not the people.”
• “…the egg had double yolks.”
• “…the stupid apple fell on Newton.”

Whether you are stressing over the upcoming event or just a person with a great sleep schedule, your keyboard knows you better than your best friend. With the advancing technology, we might expect our keyboards to offer us counselling whenever needed. 

Just as every species has a position in the ecosystem, each key on the board serves a distinct objective. If you’re a writer, your enemy is the backspace key, for it is the weapon used by doubt. The words you strung together die out as the backspace key wipes them away, slowly and steadily. The keys a, s, w, and d are essential to gamers. Programmers greatly rely on the Shift key, the Enter key, and the Space bar.

Every keyboard is like our own personal diary. From our social connections to our private notes, they know everything. They have enough information to write our stories and predict our reactions. They reveal our most used phrases, emoticons, and even stickers; they present our personalities through our texting styles. So if your keyboard could talk, what would it reveal about you?

Xainab Abrar

TLC Managing Editor