Writing Wins

The following essays, “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading” along with “The Dumbing of America” give arguments about how the growing technology and media are putting a major dent into the world of reading books and writing poetically per se. Society has drastically changed from the time of using feathered ink pens and scrolls but it doesn’t necessarily mean that our culture has become ‘dumber’ because of our increase in technology. For instance, insanely educated and just natural intelligent people must make up these technologies such as the Internet and Ipod. Dumb people are definitely not just coming up with these ideas and magically somehow making it a real thing. The argument of people becoming more ignorant of the classics, claimed in “The Dumbing of America,” because of our growing technology is acceptable since I know I do barely read a book a year of my own choice just for pleasure. But I also argue that people today are much busier than people decades and hundreds of years ago. People now have sports, for example, and practice to attain to which takes up a lot of time versus when people had more free time to do more for themselves and relax with a nice classic novel.

            In today’s society I believe writing is superior to speech and has a much bigger impact on us. Today, people can voice their opinion with just the click of a button. Blogs, Facebook, and My Space are probably the biggest, free of charge ways for people to show thousands even millions of what they agree or disagree on. With speech, not everyone can be on TV or the radio to voice their stand. Anyone can be important and influence another with writing but with speech, usually one must be of importance or their job to actually talk and have more than a room full of people listen. The Origins of Writing in Communication in History claims “writing is among the greatest invention in human history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible” (Robinson 36). I definitely agree with this claim because without it, how could anyone record our past? Without recording our past, we would only know the stories passed down by word of mouth, making it become half untrue because word does not always travel the same from person to person. Robinson also acknowledges the beginning of writing started with accounting (38). Imagine having all those numbers and not being able to record them? It would be impossible to know the money coming in and out of the company making business very hard to succeed. Everybody uses writing everyday for the most part.

            Relating back to the two Internet articles, the fear of young people losing the ability to read and write is ridiculous to me. Using the Internet and blogs, etc is just a different type of reading and writing versus reading the writings of Jane Austin. We are living in an ever-changing world, making it almost impossible to stop technology from growing enabling us to using savvy technological devices and returning back to the “olden days” forms of communications. People are still writing and I think writing more than ever since we know have the capabilities to publish our works to the world. Writing is not lacking, it is just changing and expanding to different levels because of our ever-growing technological craving. I think people are finding more people with their same views and learning from people who are completely in contrast of them because of our advancements. And with these abilities to read about other people and their thoughts, I think we learn even more than we were able to years and years ago. We are just more interested in different things now then history shows but it is not a bad thing, it just shows how our culture values different things then the past cultures did.

            The alphabet is an incredible invention to society. It has allowed us to write and understand each other using the same format. Johanna Drucker explains how the letters in the alphabet has been used for centuries in regards to written documents (47). The alphabet is a pretty amazing invention, just 26 letters has enabled us to make thousands of words and be able to communicate to each other through written documents and technological developments. Without the alphabet, the English language would not be the same or maybe not even exist making history extremely different. Writing has really made history, literally, and without it who knows what we would be learning and how much of it would actually be the spoken truth.

           

Gardner, Howard. "The End of Literacy? Don't Stop Reading." Washington Post. 17 Feb. 2008: B01. 16 Sept. 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502898.html .

Jacoby, Susan. "The Dumbing of America." Washington Post 17 Feb. 2008: B01. 16 Sept. 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html

Drucker, Johanna. "The Alphabet" 2003. Communication in History. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. 5th ed. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007. 46-55.

Robinson, Andrew. "The Origins of Writing" 2003. Communication in History. Ed. David Crowley and Paul Heyer. 5th ed. Boston: Pearson Education, 2007. 360-45.