Elaborating off of Plato's ideas that writing is untrustworthy, the chapter touched on the ordinary items we see everyday that are covered in writing. It said the dollar bill contains 81 words. 81 words! That is crazy. Right now, as I'm writing this in the Starbucks on campus, I'm looking at my drink cup. There are many more words than I imagined to be on it before I looked. "Decaf, shorts, milk, syrup, custom, drink-- not to mention the tiny font that explains the cup uses 15% less plastic than a cup made from PET. It's just a simple drink cup and yet the writing on it does make it seem more reliable. If I picked up a can of soup and all it said on it was "Campbell's Tomato Soup" a la Warhol (except not because that actually has a few more words on it) I would be too sketched out to buy it. We've gotten used to the ingredient lists, the nutritional information, the descriptive definition of the flavors that it never quite seems to recreate, and if a soup can contained none of this-- we wouldn't buy it.
I've heard from so many adults, on the top of the list are my grandparent's at Christmas dinner, that texting will ruin our generation's writing capabilities. I would have to say, this is not necessarily true. I generally find that my friends text with better grammar and spelling than my mom does. The iPhone's autocorrect aids in this, but still I find it's much easier to have a conversation with my mom on the phone rather than over text message because sometimes it's hard to understand what she is trying to say. There are multiple websites dedicated to funny text conversations with parents. Texting will most definitely change the way writing is an evolve it into something else, but this is the case with all new technologies. People are afraid of what they don't know or quite understand, as Plato's Phaedrus proves in his distrust of the written word.
I think it would be hard to find someone who would disagree with your statement that “Humans greatly rely on the internet for finding pointless facts or even useful facts.” I agree with you in saying that it is not necessarily a bad thing. I think that by having information such as this at our fingertips, we are able to focus our attention on other matters. While there are certainly things that we do need to be able to memorize, if we felt the need to memorize everything we have ever known, we would not know as much as we do. I like how you mention the issue of text messaging. While many would argue that our generation may text more than we should and that it could ruin our capabilities, I disagree with that. Personally, I text way less than many adults I know, including my own parents. While yes, there are some people who try to make their messages shorter by making the words shorter, I feel like most people who do not write out their messages are undereducated. Some people may still be in grade school and others did not go on to get education beyond high school, but I do not think that text messaging is necessarily a result of this.
ReplyDeleteKatie, I agree that texting, and similar uses of technology, may actually be increasing the literacy of people today. We are surrounded by information on a constant basis, and we inevitably interact with this text, and form our own thinking in reaction to it, just as you did in Starbucks with your coffee cup. Surely, if we are always reading and always writing, even if it is just a text, our literacy skills are bound to improve. I know there are those that worry that texting and similar social media will harm writing skills as acronyms and shorthand may make way into more formal writing, but I think the benefits of constantly trying to express ourselves and communicate with one another will trump these negative consequences.
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