Reading Response #3

For the in class essay I wrote my opinion concerning the article, “The New Literacy” by Clive Thompson. I agreed with his approach that technology is bettering the new generation of students. The new technology such as texting, blogging, twittering, and facebook updates are only helping our students write more. If students are writing more outside of class then their in class writing is going to improve. The reason why the students write a vast about out of class is because they enjoy it more. Students would rather write on a blog or text because they know they have an audience. If your writing an essay that the only person reading it is a professor who reads it and gives it a grade and it’s done. Therefore, technology today is improving students writing. Although in Sven Birkerts article, “The Owl Has Flown”, he argues differently. He believes that technology is ruining our new generation because of many reasons. According to Birkerts, “The computer, our high-speed, accessing, storing, and sorting tool, appears as a godsend. It increasingly determines what kind of information we are willing to traffic in; if something cannot be written in code and transmitted in, it cannot be important” (33). This is valid because he says in so many words books are not really important anymore. We have the internet or in other words the famous Google. Birkerts is convinced that the new generation believes that if we have technology we can do anything. Students probably question what the point of reading is if you can just search it on the internet. It would be a waste of time to read a book about something when you can skim the web page. This relates to my essay because it is the complete opposite of what I argued. Yes, Birkerts debate is valid and I do agree with it to a point. Of course some students take advantage of the internet and don’t learn anything when searching. On the flip side some students take advantage of the internet and find out a lot of new things that they would be hard to understand and find in a book. Books will always be a good source but now that technology has developed, technology is now a great source too. Just because we found a new source of accessing information does not mean we will forget about our old ways. The way I look at it we won because we now have more sources and we should take advantage of that.