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.