Mechanization: Before and After
Module 3- Mechanization Before and After
Writing Style, Questioning Authority and the Validity of Information
The emergence of technology has no doubt impacted education and indeed the overall society,
prior the technology information was transmitted via papyrus, manuscript and codex. Over the
years there has been changes in the way we read and write, due to technology we have seen the
emergence of various social media platform such as Twitter where persons have to make post
within a specified amount of characters, this has led to changes in the way people communicate
mainly write and text, we have now seen high usage of shorthand writing. This point was supported
by Engell and O’Donell in their audio presentation entitled From Papyrus to Cyberspace “books
are becoming shorter, attention span is getting less in this very fast paced world. Email language
brings out abbreviation, internet communication depends on typing therefore there is a premium
on shorter words, example hi is more common or have replaced hello because you spend less time
typing it and typing f2f is shorter than face to face”.
In contemporary society we have now seen the emergence of words which has now dominated the vocabulary, these include tmrw for tomorrow, bcus for because, wateva for whatever, btw for by the way, idk for I don’t know, btwn for between and y for why. So common are these shorthand words persons are using them in formal documents such as letters and essays. In an interview with Mr. Simon Brown a grade 9 English teacher at a high school in Kingston, it was revealed that students often times present papers which include shorthand words. In the past writing was formal and well structured, author enjoyed some level of respect and prestige. Bolter stated that just as late capitalism is still vigorous, so are books and other printed materials in the age of print are still common and enjoy considerable prestige especially for humanities and some of the social sciences.
It must be noted that information received were more reliable as newspapers and books were the main source of information. “Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion. This sense affects literary creations and it affects analytic philosophical or scientific work. Before print, writing itself encouraged some sense of noetic closure. By isolating thought on a written surface, detached from any interlocutor, making utterance in this sense autonomous and indifferent to attack, writing presents utterance and thought as uninvolved with all else, somehow self-contained, complete”. (Ong, 1982, p.132)”.
However, it could be argued that technology and by extension social media has had the greatest impact on free speech and communication of all times, rivalling the newspaper and even threatening its existence. “We now face a rather different order of political change with the rapid development of the internet. Over the course of the last ten years, the internet has opened a new world of information to the public, he further argued that over the course of the last ten years, the internet has opened a new world of information to the public. The increased access to information relates to every aspect of our lives and is on such a scale that it seems bound to alter relationship between democracy and education. One dramatic, if surprising, example of the internet’s democratic impact on public education and empowerment, in its broadest sense, is with public access to health information. The result has been patients and their families now bring web-based medical information to their doctor’s offices, although they may not understand it well, nor is the information always reliable”. (Willinsky, 2002, p.367)
“Printing and literacy would change human thought, mode of expression, the principal idea of each generation would no longer write itself with the same material and in the same way persons became more exposed and was able to disseminate information develop and understanding and as such made informed decisions which at times challenged authority and the status quo” (Bolter, 2001, p.3)
It is evident that on a number of occasions where information has been placed and eventually spread on social media, this information is transmitted to millions of users within seconds, these information in most cases are not properly vetted before posting, there is little or no incentive to do so and many persons are often hurt by the information presented. It must be noted that with traditional media there are a number of checks and balances prior to publication because of the possibilities of severe penalties in law such as liber suits and defamation, this is similar to books that are published. Engell and O’Donnell argued that “rapid dissemination of information brings fears that more thrash will be transported though thrash was transported by professors in common room long before the internet. Students today have more information at their fingertips. It was further argued that there are many corrupt evidence of literary works over the internet however there is poor quality material that has been printed as well. Publish words to millions of people without the benefit of an intermediary, that gate keeping function has collapsed means flood of information to the end users”.
Bibliography
Bolter, J (2001). Writing Spaces: Computers, hypertext and the remediation of print. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, London
Engell J & O’Donnell J (1999). From Papyrus to Cyberspace. [Audio File]. Cambridge Forum
Ong, W.J. (1982) Orality and Literacy : The Technologizing of the Word. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge
Willinsky, J (2002) Education and Democracy: The missing link may be ours. Harvard Educational Review, 72 (3), 367-392.