Thoughts of Two

The New Literacy by Clive Thompson and "The Machine is Us/ing Us" by M. Welsch, are two very different points of view on the topic of technology. In The New Literacy, the author looks at technology as a good thing. Some of the points I agree with, and some I do not. There is a part that talks about how texting improves writing because it gets students to write all the time. However, the students don't really write when they text. There are spelling, grammar, structure, and organizational errors. I wouldn't even consider it writing. We have almost created our own language with acronyms and shortened words. Do you honestly think that jk lol ttyl g2g bi... etc. is actually considered writing? If anything, I think that texting is hurting our skills. I will be writing a paper and accidentally incorporate lol, or something like that into it, if you ask me, I don't think that's a good thing. The other thing that struck me about the article was that they used Stanford Law Students as their studies. Of course Stanford students are still going to have wonderful writing. If you're going to Stanford, you are not going to let texting ruin your ability to write. If they had tested other average students, I think there results would have differed greatly.
In the video "The Machine is Us/ing Us," Welsch describes the use of technology in a very different way. Although his video is hard to find what he is trying to say, I think that he would disagree with Thompson's article. In his video, it almost seems as if he's trying to say that machines are becoming too important in human life. That we, us, are becoming like the machines themselves, in a deeper content. Think about it. We run the machines. We organize everything we do on our computers. The computer is being controlled by us, but in a way, us by them. Everyone has a face book, everyone interacts via technology. Like Mrs. Comp says, that when she was in school everyone just used the computer and the internet to extract information, but now, we are using it to interact with other people and create our own information for others to see and think about. Like the video says, the machines are linking web pages, photos, videos, information, and people. We are being linked by technology. That can be a good thing, or it can be a bad thing. Either way you look at it, machines truly are using us.