Baron

“I found that I had become so used to composing virtual prose at a keyboard that I could no longer draft anything coherent directly onto paper.”

I know what he means by this. I suffer through the same thing but with animation. I used to love drawing, but now that I am proficient in 3D animation, I find it as the most tedious thing someone can make me do. I hate how to make a drawing move you have to redraw everything in the picture. Stupid. I like being able to just move something when I want and only having to move that piece.

“Each new literacy technology begins with a restricted communication function and is available only to a small number of initiates.”

This makes sense because people are a skeptical breed. We like what we know. When someone comes up with a new revolutionary idea, we are very weary of it until it is tried and tried again.

“While brave new literacy technologies offer new opportunities for producing and manipulating text, they also present new opportunities for fraud.”

This is very true. Before the wide use of “copy and paste”, Plagiarism was very time consuming and not worth the risk of getting caught. It took just as long to write someone else’s ideas as to jot down your own. The internet also helps by pooling in a bunch of resources to choose from to rip material from. I had an entire five page paper in high school that was completely plagiarized.  It was a health project and no one used their own work. I literally cut and paste three full wiki articles and I received a 92% on it. (I would not do this again.)

“Humanists have long been considered out of the technology loop”

I’d have to go with a “you don’t say!” here. The name implies that they feel that humans should be more organic in their actions and less artificial.  The term usually applies to the people who use more technology than say, the Amish,   but would never dream of pushing our technology further. They’re like Grandparents. They’ll use a cell phone, a TV, and remotes, but a computer might just be pushing it.

“It is true that some well-known writers have rejected new-fangledness”

As a child of the internet and computer age, I find this hard to believe, but I am sure that there are some older writers that prefer the good ol’ days of type writing or even pencil. Thoreau believed that telegraphs were unnecessary due to the fact that there is nothing that Maine would ever need to communicate to Texas. Well, time as proved that wrong on many occasions and shows us that new technologies can create new problems, but also solve old. 

“The telephone was initially received as an interesting but impractical technology for communication”

It’s funny how looking back into the history of an everyday object can shock you. You’d think that everyone would have been initially on board for something like a telephone because everyone today uses one. I bet you cannot name a single person that you personally know that has never used the phone at least once in their lives. Funny how perspective changes over time.