To what extent have the literacy practices of English speakers been shaped by communications technology?
To what extent have the literacy practices of English speakers been shaped by communications technology?
In this assignment I will be looking at the ways in which literacy practices have changed with the advent of technology. I will be focusing on how children use technology and how that differs from the way adults do. From the invention of writing to the printing press to the typewriter and the computer, the entire history of literacy has been dependent on the technical advances that it has used. According to Eisenstein ‘as printing came to supersede hand copying by scribes texts came to be more widely disseminated’ (p.282). Since the PC (the personal computer) became widely circulated the act of writing has had several factors which have recently disappeared. The most obvious of these is a record of errors made in the writing process. Traditional methods of writing have required that mistakes made be done over. Because of this, authors were more liable to take care with what they wrote. Today, with word processors, and programs to check spelling and grammar, this activity is much less common. Instead of carefully considering both the original words and any correction, the ease with which ideas can be revised allows ideas to be written down without much forethought, as errors are easily dealt with.
Technology evolves rapidly and what was considered new and unique becomes old and commonplace. The following three different types of literacy practices are all currently in use:
Newspaper vs. Blogs
Regular mail and phone are typically used for one-on-one communication. Newspapers and radio are older forms of one-to-many communication. Over the past decade, blogs arrived on the scene and they’ve had tremendous success as a form of one-to-many communication. The reason for this is that blogs leveraged something that was done very poorly in newspapers and somewhat better in radio – our need for feedback. Blogs made feedback frictionless. Anyone can comment on
In this assignment I will be looking at the ways in which literacy practices have changed with the advent of technology. I will be focusing on how children use technology and how that differs from the way adults do. From the invention of writing to the printing press to the typewriter and the computer, the entire history of literacy has been dependent on the technical advances that it has used. According to Eisenstein ‘as printing came to supersede hand copying by scribes texts came to be more widely disseminated’ (p.282). Since the PC (the personal computer) became widely circulated the act of writing has had several factors which have recently disappeared. The most obvious of these is a record of errors made in the writing process. Traditional methods of writing have required that mistakes made be done over. Because of this, authors were more liable to take care with what they wrote. Today, with word processors, and programs to check spelling and grammar, this activity is much less common. Instead of carefully considering both the original words and any correction, the ease with which ideas can be revised allows ideas to be written down without much forethought, as errors are easily dealt with.
Technology evolves rapidly and what was considered new and unique becomes old and commonplace. The following three different types of literacy practices are all currently in use:
Newspaper vs. Blogs
Regular mail and phone are typically used for one-on-one communication. Newspapers and radio are older forms of one-to-many communication. Over the past decade, blogs arrived on the scene and they’ve had tremendous success as a form of one-to-many communication. The reason for this is that blogs leveraged something that was done very poorly in newspapers and somewhat better in radio – our need for feedback. Blogs made feedback frictionless. Anyone can comment on
Bibliography: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview