“When he sees the part of the screen that has the word that he’s looking for, he punches a little mouse. Then the screen changes and we see lines of words scrolling down, and those are the words from that part of the screen. Then when he sees the word he wants, he activates his little switch again. Then you see the screen changing again and you see the words, and when he sees the next word he wants, he punches the device again. Then that word goes across the bottom of the screen. And he builds his sentence at the bottom of a screen. When he gets the sentence completed, he makes another movement, which indicates that his synthetic voice should speak that sentence. … It sounds simple, but it’s not simple. It moves at the speed of a video game, and very often he misses a word or misses the line, and then the whole thing has to start over. What that means is that working with him can be frustrating. Very often, you know what word he’s after. You know what word he wants to capture. But protocol says you do not second-guess him. You do not move ahead and say, ‘Stephen, I know what you’re trying to say.’ You let him finish. Because he’s going to finish anyway. It would be impolite, as it would be to interrupt anybody talking.”
—
science writer Kitty Ferguson (who helped Hawking edit The Universe in a Nutshell) on Stephen Hawking’s communication style
In Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, Hélène Mialet (not without controversy) provides ethnographic context for the networks that allow Hawking (and the rest of us) to work as a singular, individual identity distributed into a complex nexus of a materialized human body and its variously incorporated machines.
