A Better Pencil - New Technologies Everyday

            After the reading assigned for the class, there were many quotes and ideas that came to my mind. Right from the start I found very interesting the way the writer talked about technologies and the acceptance of those. Our generation is used to all of these new technologies developed in gadgets and devices, but how did people looked at them when they were first created? As it’s mentioned in the book, they were accepted the same way that the wheel was first accepted. Today, we would guarantee the progress of the wheel and how that helped our culture to develop. But in fact, many people wouldn’t had seen it as an evolution. Human being, as all other animals, like what is safe, and what they know how it works. Although we all support the progress and evolution of technologies, many of us are critics when a new product or idea is brought to life. I wanted to try to understand how would people feel, and look at something new today, compared to how they looked before. Are our minds still as closed to progress as they were before? In my opinion they are not. And the proof is that every time there is something newer or better than our we want to have it. Of course there are still a lot of people that don’t agree with this, and think that digital technologies are destroying literacy. They have their own evidences that we can’t prove wrong, but we fight those comments with the positive outcomes that we had with those digital technologies.

            One of the more interesting quotes, that made me consider all the factors and results from the technological progresses we made, talks about the changes that occur in literacy. “Whether we embrace them or fear them, the technologies that we use to compose, disseminate, and archive our words … not only make reading and writing possible, they also have affected our reading and writing practices. The technologies of our literacy … help to determine what we write and what we can’t write. But the technology works two ways: it channels what we do, but it also changes to meet the needs of writers and readers, who play a role in modifying the direction that writing technology takes.” The first part of this quotes is very important, and we have to realize that the use of computers allowed us to become writers, because we get much more practice than before. This quote also shows the negative part which is directing the flow of what we write depending on the technology we are using.

In my opinion changes are going to happen every day, and we can’t simply ignore them or stop them from happening. The best solution is to use all the positive outcomes while trying to not get negatively affected.