From Pencils to Pixels

According to the article, the computer is said to be the gateway to literacy. I agree because for people to be digitally literate as well as being able to read and write on paper, then they need a computer. Writing itself is a technology, a way of engineering material in order to accomplish an end. A pencil is a technology because it is a tool in writing. Plato disliked writing because he feared it would weaken our memory. While writing cannot replace many speech functions, it allows us to communicate in ways that speech does not. Writing lacks such tonal cues of the human voice as pitch and stress, not to mention the physical cues that accompany face to face communication, but it also permits new ways of bridging time and space. Thoreau honestly thought pencils were better for writing than electrical impulses, and he simply kept his business life and his intellectual life in separate compartments. Telephone communication combined aspects of speaking and writing situations in new ways. The telephone and writing were both shaped in the same way because people had to learn how to compose and converse. Technology has impacted fraudulent writings and activities because digitized text is easy to corrupt accidentally, or to fiddle with on purpose. Baron's conclusion talks about how the computer has indeed changed the ways some of us do things with words, and the rapid changes in technological development suggest that it will continue to do so in ways we cannot yet foresee. The article implicitly defines literacy as being able to keep up with the latest technological advances.

Yancey's Writing in the 21st Century

The 3 challenges of writing in the 21st century are developing new models of writing, designing a new curriculum supporting those models, and creating models for teaching those models. Yancey explained writing as a technology that exists "in spite of" because of the challenges faced. Only certain people could write because there were prohibitions against females, colored people, and young kids. Yancey's main argument is to get students to compose often and become the citizen writers of our future. Writing hasn't gotten as much cultural respect as reading because society could control it citizens through reading whereas when writing, citizens can exercise their own control. Reading tends to produce feelings of intimacy and warmth while writing was associated with unpleasantness. Some negative associations people make with writing is that it required a good deal of labor and it has been associated with testing. Process writing is a curriculum composed of inanition, drafting, peer review, reflection, revising and rewriting, and publishing. Self sponsored writing is a writing that belongs to a writer, and not an institution, with the result that people want to compose. I do self writing in text messages, emails, and on twitter. The 21st century is the age of composition because it is a period where composers become composers not through direct and formal instruction, but rather through what we call an extracurricular social co-apprentenship. This article matters because the meaning of literacy has changed and educators need to become serious about helping students become citizen composers. Literacy is described as being able not only to read and write on paper but also on social media.

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Thompson's main claim is that people can connect to many more people and actually keep up with their lives. Zuckerburg first introduced the News Feed to keep up with friends easier. He claimed that to know what was going on people had to actively surf different users profiles. It is so much easier now that Zuckerburg developed News Feed because by simply logging in to Facebook a person can see everybody's posts. I think that the News Feed is a good thing in terms of literacy because in order to to be digitally literate, people need something that is quick and easy to access. Ambient awareness is defined as incessant online contact that is very much like being physically near someone and picking up on their mood. I experience ambient awareness because when looking at people's posts and tweets I can tell how they are feeling. The paradox with ambient awareness is that we are not actually physically with our friends and we did not look at their body language to determine their mood. The downfall is that we may not want to hang out with certain friends as often because we will already know how they are doing and what they have been up to. However a benefit could be that a friends posts or tweets could lead a friend to wanting to hang out with them because they are curious and want to talk about the types of things the friend has been posting. An ambient update is frequent, tiny updates on what a person is doing such as "eating lunch in the student center with Kate". Because so many things are posted or tweeted, most people skim through their news feeds and pick and choose what to read. But by doing this, this proves how people cannot stay concentrated long enough to actually read everyones posts and think about what they really mean. Thompson says that our weak ties and acquaintances actually help us out on social media. He talked about how they are not as similar to us as our close friends are and that they can answer many of our questions that our close friends cannot. But certain people in their 20s feel pressured by social media. They do not want to be involved but they feel like they must in order to maintain a positive image. They do not want people talking about them negatively or posting old pictures of them that could ruin their image. This article defines literacy as the ability to increase the number of people you stay in contact with and keep up with all of their lives.