The scene: I’m in middle school at the dinner table. My grandparents are visiting from out-of-state. We’re eating supper and my grandmother is monologuing about how e-books and computers will be the end of people reading, the end of people using their brains, the end of the world. (The last one may be a bit exaggerated). Well, almost 10 years later and people are still reading, people are still using their brains, and the world continues to spin, despite increases in green house gasses. E-books, e-readers, and computers have not spelled certain doom for us all.
One of the things I really enjoyed in Baron’s article was the explanation that this type of reaction isn’t uncommon and goes back as far as writing itself. There have always been people who say that the newest writing technologies will be the downfall of civilization and thought; even the introduction of writing itself was met by skeptics, including Plato. According to Baron, Plato worried “that [writing] would weaken our memories” (4). Each time someone introduces a new technology there are people who support it and people who think it will be disastrous. This plays into the stages of literacy technologies that Baron explores in his article. I’ve tried to paraphrase them below.
- The technology is new and expensive, so it’s limited to a very, very small group. For example, when books were handwritten and hand to be copied, they were insanely expensive. The only people who could afford books were the people who had the money to buy them, which wasn’t really a large percentage of the population. Gradually, this small group of individuals mediates the technology for everybody else. For our book example, this might be priests using the written bible to teach scripture to the masses.
- Some group takes the new technology and makes the technology accessible and understandable for the general public by connecting it to previous technologies. One example in Baron’s article that demonstrated this for me was the computer word processing. While word processing was something computers were capable of, it wasn’t until the screen mimicked paper that the general public started to use computer word processing.
- The cost of the technology lowers and the technology begins to imitate previously popular communications, which means it becomes more popular, more widely used, and becomes a new literacy for the population to acquire. When books started to be printed and because more widely accessible, writing became a literacy that the larger population started to acquire. No longer were the rich and the religious the only one’s who could read; the middle class began to read and literacy eventually spread (over hundreds of years) to even the lower classes.
So have you experienced this same type of prophecy of cultural doom from your grandparents or parents? Or am I the only one? Let me know if you think of any other examples that illustrate these three steps.
Without perspective it seems as if someone rejecting the telegraph or even a pencil as too new of a technology, is ridiculous. But I think you do a great job with putting it into perspective. I feel as if we’ve all interacted with people who have a huge push back against technology. My grandfather is insistent that the world is coming to an end because of computers (his exact words are something like “does your generation even use their brain anymore?”). It really makes me wonder if our generation will be the same. It feels as if we’ve grown up in a world where you have to adapt to technology, that this adaptation process is almost second nature, do you think we’d fall into the same fear that older generations have when it comes to changing tech?
This is an interesting question, for sure. The thing about our generation and anyone who was young in the late 80’s or 90’s, is that so much technological change has happened in our lifetimes. At least for me, this brings up this odd sense of nostalgia when thinking about being a kid; looking back, things seem so much simpler because they were. There weren’t smartphones, or iPads, or eReaders. I bring this up because I don’t think our generation will ever stop being able to adapt to new technologies. We may become a bit less adept at our adaption, but I doubt that quality will ever disappear entirely. However, I think our generation will have trouble relating to children who are born in the technology age. I know I already can’t relate to children who play on their parents phones while waiting in restaurants or who learn their letters through iPad games. My guess is that this distancing will become the bigger thing that qualifies people our age as we get older. But that’s just me.