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.