Changing With the Times: Literacy and Technology

In From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies Dennis Baron discusses how communication technologies have changed and impacted communities throughout history. This article reminded me a lot of Ong's Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought in that both articles note that writing is a technology and has not always had the place in communication that it has today. Similarly, the pencil, something that is taken for granted as a commonplace device, required painstaking experimentation and expense to perfect, and also caused controversy much like the computer and other technologies continue to arouse. Baron says that it is too early to tell what long-term effects the computer will have upon society, but that it is unmistakable that it has changed society in significant ways.

I think that with every technology there is the possibility for gains and losses, for benefits and harms. It is wonderful that computers and the internet have made it possible for information to be instantly available at the stroke of a key. This opens up huge possibilities for learning and has made research much more convenient for many people. On the flip side, I think of a research paper I wrote about for my Critical Approaches to Literature and Culture class about the impact of social media upon society. One of the sources I used was a book called Brain Rules by John Medina. Medina points out that contrary to what some may think, the brain is actually incapable of multitasking. This doesn't mean that people are incapable of doing things like playing the piano and singing at the same time, but that "we are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously" (85). What does this mean? Think about the modern-day high school (and even college) student. Many students regularly engage in what appears to be multiple activities at once: working on homework while simultaneously searching youtube videos, texting friends, listening to music, and checking facebook. Since the brain cannot process all these things at once, it has to switch back and forth, causing it to work much less efficiently. Many of us are so used to doing this that it may seem to work just fine, but consider the effect that habits like this may be having upon a student's quality of work or their retention of material. Or consider the reality that we may be so used to giving multiple things only partial attention that we may be training ourselves to give nothing our full attention. This could have a huge impact upon literacy, not just in the academic setting, but in all of life. Of course, like Baron points out, we cannot yet know the long-term impact of computer technology upon society as a whole. Perhaps, we will all learn to adapt in new ways, discovering cognitive capabilities that are now unknown. At this point, however, it seems that our media-addicted culture is certainly not teaching students to process information to their fullest capacity.