Birkets Reading Response

The main idea for my first in class essay was about “The New Literacy” by Clive Thompson and how technology is actually helping the writing of the students today, and not making their writing worse. Students are writing far more today than past generations ever did because they now have access to multiple outlets to write in, whether it is in an email, blog or text message. My argument in this essay was that students are choosing or prefer to take part in “real world” writing as compared to the assigned essays in class. This preference seems to be occurring because in “real world” writing the student’s ideas are not being critiqued or judged for a grade, making it easier to express themselves. I also argued that students enjoy writing outside of the classroom more because they feel their writing actually has a purpose, since more people beside their professor will be reading it.
In Sven Birkets essay “The Owl Has Flown” he discusses that over time our reading has changed from the vertical to the horizontal. He states in his writing that “this shift from vertical to horizontal parallels the overall societal shift from bounded lifetimes spent in single locales to lives lived in geographical dispersal amid streams of data” (31). The essence of Birkets’ argument is that once our reading was based around the depth and understanding of what we were reading (vertical). However, now our reading has shifted because we have access to such a wide range of texts (horizontal). He goes on to suggest that our new horizontal type of reading has affected not only the way we read but also the way we see the world around us. I personally disagree with this statement because I believe even though we have such a large selection of reading to choose from, we are still able to get a deep understanding of what we are reading. From this quote I am left to believe that technology isn’t only changing our writing but also our reading. It is creating a larger selection of reading to choose from and is allowing us to access this reading easier than in the past, where you had to go to the library or bookstore. Overall, I believe that technology is indeed improving our writing and reading because it is giving us a larger selection of ways to take part in writing and reading.