Pencils to Pixels

In this article, the author notes that the computer is the gateway to literacy, and I strongly agree on this. The more the computer is adapted into the everyday lives of people and becoming a staple in the home, we are introducing children to it at younger and younger ages. Because it is such an easily accessible and adaptable format, it is incredibly easy to teach children to use, thus giving them access to amounts of material that would normally be out of their hands and ways that came make reading both entertaining and interactive, two key factors to teaching children anything.

It then goes on to talk about how writing is a technology in the sense that it was designed with a purpose. No matter how it is done, it is engineered to spread words and ideas further and faster than spoken word. In order to create the technology of writing, we had to engineer the tools to be able to use, which is where things like the pencils come into play. They've been through several stages, as all technology always does, and serve a great purpose in the world. They are also no simple task to make, and took a great deal of work and testing to get them where they could actually be useable. Though viewed as a simple tool, they are far from it.

Throughout history, there have been those who discouraged the technology of written word, one of those being Plato. He feared the changes of it all, and what it would do to our minds. More specifically, he feared that it would delapidate our memories. In his day, all stories, even immense epics, were all told by word of mouth, and would have to be learned and remembered by those that told them. It was how these things were passed down for generations, which in today's age seems nearly impossible, so I really couldn't say that he was wrong. But writing has helped us as a world a good bit as well. It allowed for things to not just travel across from person to person, but also bridging time and distance. It allowed us to write letters to one another, and novels that wouldn't have to be taken in all at once, it could instead be done at the leisure of our own time. It also made laws more accessible because they didn't have to just be remembered. 

All of this connected to Henry David Thoreau in that he was a key proponent in the making of pencils. His family owned what was one of the biggest pencil factories of the time, and it was his devout research that made them so sought after. It was also this work that supported him, rather than all of the books that he wrote or any of his families money. It was a key part in his life, even though he never seemed to actually write about it like he had written against the use of telegraphs.

Telephones changed communication because we had to learn whole new ways of talking to one another, new ways of greeting each other, and made a great new way of talking to those who were away from us even faster. This would fulfill our need for an instant gratification, where writing had once made it easier. So in a way, it was the next step off of writing to communicate to one another easily. 

Technology did have quite a downside to it, though, and that was that it made stealing someone else's work as your own. It's made so much more available to the whole world, but in turn it has made everything that is out there available to be printed under different names, or to change what a document said to look incriminating, and even to steal other people's information. 

The point that this article is trying to get across is that all of this new technology needs to be viewed as something open, something to be embraced. We can't run from it, it's not going to just go away, and it's not going to get any smaller. What we do with it is entirely up to us, it can degrade us, it can enhance up, but regardless we have to accept it and try to do the best that we can with it. It's a new age of literacy, of reading and creating things through computers. As a society, we just have to be sure that it doesn't affect our retention and instead make sure that we use it to learn and become better as a whole.

Writing in the 21st Century

The three main challenges that this articles notes posed in this modern world are developing new models for writing, designing a new curriculum in schools to support these new models, and, in order to make all of this work, finding new ways to teach these models to future generations. It then explains how writing is an impulse that exists in man, and that people have always wanted to write, no matter what the society around them has restricted them to. It says that we as humans have found ways to break those holds and write in spite of the laws or old expectations, be them women who were very much just objectified and constrained to certain areas, or people of color facing the law restricting any ideas or freedoms on them, or even children who would be told they weren't ready to write yet. Society has always found a way, some way, in spite of all these things. Thus, this article's main push is that now that we are so much more open to allow writing into peoples lives, we need to teach writing whenever we can, so that we can open up all of these new forms of composition and learn to mold new minds with the new age of technology.
This article poses the idea that reading has always been valued over writing because of how the teaching system has always worked, and the reasons behind this. The teaching of reading has been pushed because society has wanted more receptors to join its ranks, those who would be more likely to just accept what they are being told and the control above them. This would be taught over writing because writing would teach people to think their own thoughts more and find their own ways of doing things, exercising their own control, which could cause change, and that has always made society scared. Writing is also a great deal of work, often leading to uncomfort or stress, whereas reading forms a sort of intimacy and positive emotional response, polar opposites of each other. I have experienced this same feeling from time to time, especially in a school setting, as I was usually made to write on topics that were very hard to write on and of no real interest to me. This leads to a typical feeling that alot of people share about writing: that it's just boring. To write a paper was always viewed as a dreaded matter because of the time it consumed to what always seemed to be no end.
One of the key ways in which writing is taught now is the method of process writing, the system of starting a paper, looking it all over again, and revising it, even giving it to others to read so that they could see it from another perspective and revise it further until you had a much more polished paper that what would've been had in the beginning. This process has made writing a simpler tasks on the minds than telling children to write, and in turn much easier to teach them to write for themselves. All of this teaching and practicing would later lead for people to be communicate more well thought ideas into the world, which would lead to the digital age of writing.
Crucial to the digital age of writing is self-sponsored writing, writing to people for your own personal cause in hopes of a response. This can come out in droves, much more than anyone could have ever anticipated when it comes to response from around the world in a matter of minutes, and the people who are participating in this realize its phenomenal power and use it frequently. It's creating a whole new era of communication, something the likes of which the world had never seen before. I myself have not yet participated in this movement to invoke any type of response, but I do see it's potential and would love to jump into it in the future. It's ushering in a whole new system, a new century, the 21st Century of Communication and Composition online.
This article is important because it shows us just how much writing has changed over time, and how the experience has of writing itself has shifted from a position of anguish and stress in the mind to something that is truly enjoyable and that people want to participate in.

A Brave New World

Thompson's main claim throughout this article appears to be that the entire construct of how we as a human race interact and make friends and keep up with what one another is doing is changing rapidly due to the growth of social media. No longer do we have to keep constantly keep asking what people are up to, to keep a conscious link among all of our friends. Social media allows for us to keep tabs on everyone, even those that we don't know that well. It creates a whole new mode of communication and allow for us to even make us feel as though we never really left a person, and can pick things up mid-conversation with people upon meeting them. To break up all of this information brought through the digital age, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook introduced the News Feed. He did this so that people would no longer have to search through everyone pages one at a time, it consolidated all of that information into one main page, allowing for people to see everything in their interests as soon as they log in. I think that this change tells alot about our attention span, in that it is slowly dying off and making us not want to have to search through things to find our interests, we want instant gratification in more aspects of our lives. I would say this hurts our literacy to a degree, as it isn't really communicating but more just reading what is going on around us. It does lead into conversations, though, so it could help it in a sense as well. All of these things lead to a sense of ambient awareness, a name for the constant, overlaying online contact that today's generation keeps on the world around it. I too have become a member in this pool of information, making sure to keep track of the news and what my friends are posting through media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter. It does create a paradox, though, in that while we can keep this awareness, it can often work as a way to replace the true, face to face interactions, distancing ourselves from the people we keep tabs on online and weakening the bonds of really talking to someone. Because these ambient updates are skimmable, short and often uninteresting to us based on various factors, this sort of dulls our literacy in that we are not interested to get into any deeper reading or always think deeper on what is actually going on in someones life, reading things at strictly face value. The author describes how this emerging media format is also adding to our "weak ties", people we are not actively friends with but still keep in contact with. These ties can be great for us as people because it keeps us interested in things that aren't necessarily an immediate part of our lives, as well as helping our problem solving through the internet because it gives us people that know us and may know far more than we do on certain topics we need help on. The younger generations feel more connected to this sort of media because of how quickly it is growing and how everyone around them is using it more and more avidly. They are forming more and more digital ties throughout the world, making a more connected world around themselves. This article defines literacy as our ability to make and extend friendships through our digital age and to be able to read peoples thoughts and emotions through the blurbs and comments that we post. We are learning to more quickly understand people and keep ties without actually being right in front of people talking to them and reading their faces, instead reading a digital face to see who people really are, or at least who they are when they are online. This reinforced my idea of how these articles are describing literacy in this new era, changing from our face to face interactions into a much more digital-centric age and shifting how the whole world can see what you are doing in an instant.