Reading Response #3

One main idea in class essay was that technology is benefiting our writing. I agreed with Clive Thompson’s ideas from the “New Literacy” that my awareness of audience has improved because I am constantly writing for an audience over Facebook and other public ways of writing. I also think that we need to come to terms with the idea that a “New Literacy” is finding its way into our lives and not see it as a good or bad thing but just as the way it is. Another point that I mentioned in my essay was that when I write for an audience of my peers I feel like what I write is full of more importance than when I am just writing for a teacher (just like the Stanford students in Andrea Lunsford’s study.)
In Sven Birkert’s essay “The Owl Has Flown” he makes several points that I don’t agree with. Birkerts states that “The explosion of data-along with general societal secularization and the collapse of what the theorists call the “master narratives” (Christian, Marxist, Freudian, humanist…)-has all but destroyed the premise of understandability. Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vista of information that stretches endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture.” This quote is basically saying that when people read or write now a day they don’t take time to learn about one specific thing and fully talk about that when we write because we are exposed to such a vast amount of information and we are constantly just skimming what we read, and writing faster than we should and that doing that is a bad thing. This idea is relevant because I feel that it’s necessary to look at both sides of an argument as large as this one and through Birkert’s essay I was able to do this. I still disagree with the majority of his essay, but I can relate to the idea of large amounts of information being shoved at you constantly. This can be very overwhelming, and sometimes it does cause me to just skim things and not take in what I’m reading. Technology has made it so easy to get information that sometimes it just provides to much, and it’s hard to know when to draw the line.