Month: March 2024

This reading brought me to face a reality that I’ve noticed and commented on before but never really fully confronted. That reality being that everyday we get closer to the totality of digital media and subsequently leaving printed literature of all kinds behind. In the writing the author mentions that we are living through a period of overlap which I think hits it right on the money.

The way in which I really this statement bears true is by looking at the generations of people around you and asking them what they do in their free time or what year they were first given a phone. I specifically think my generation which is Gen Z and the tail end of the millennial’s are the exact example of the overlap the author mentioned. Millennial’s grew up watching television, but didn’t receive their first piece of handheld electronic communication until around high school, they grew up with radio shows, Walkmans, cassettes and MTV along with pagers and those brick phones. The tail end of this generation received phones in high school but still relied heavily on books, lectures, and in person education for all learning, but at the same time they are losing the importance of the news paper, planners’s, call books, and much more less modernized technology. As my generation steps into the picture we see large advancements in portable technology such as game boys, iPhones, computers and even e-literature. In elementary I was learning part of my education through online programs in the library and at this time we see a direct shift in the way of learning through curriculum that’s been enhance by technology.

I was still able to grow up with a small amount of technology shoved in my face though, I didn’t grow up with an iPad in my hands, we still read paper books and were always given handouts and live lectures. We were to write essays, not type them. Personal laptops such as MacBooks didn’t even come in to the picture until about my freshman year of high school; yes they were around, but we did not depend on them like today’s form of education. My generation was the last generation to experience at least any part of life with out a screen being somehow involved.

We are coming up over that overlay curve very quickly. This new generation of children are completely enveloped in technology to the point where it’s a bit concerning. Young kids are given an iPad as a distraction, pre-teens are given a phone and those 2 things consume the child’s life. TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, streaming services, online learning, door dash, kindle, VR, it’s all this generation knows. Kid’s don’t play outside anymore, they don’t read the funny section on the paper because their parents read the news on their phone, most kids don’t even watch cable anymore because it’s becoming outdated.

It’s just an insane line of change that we’ve seen these past 30 years, technological advancements are eating any thing that isn’t electronic alive. Even things that are electronic are becoming as outdated as the newspaper. I think the moment we started to shift was the creation of the Pager; the first piece of technology that was able to tear you out of physical reality at any moment. This response is a bit all over the place but I hope my thoughts were still conveyed in an understandable way.

An additional resource that I looked into was a website that described the generational shifts between each generation and I think it helps support my points as to why each generation is so different. https://imagine.jhu.edu/blog/2022/11/17/the-changing-generational-values/

The relationship between text and the reader is much more complex than I originally perceived it to be. In the article it talked about how reading is a one way street whereas, talking with someone is 2 ways. When you are listening to someone tell a story you can pause them, ask a question to make sure you are perceiving and understanding the story in the way they intended but when reading a text of a story, there is no clarification. In this situation there is only the readers understanding and hope that the readers is envisioning things correctly. An author can be as descriptive and detailed a they want to be but there will always be a chance for interpretation from the reader that might augment the reality the author is trying to explain.

The text talks about the uncertainty to communication between text and reader and while I do think that is true based on how I explained my thoughts earlier, I do believe that the relationship between text and reader isn’t as complex and unstable as the text claims. Yes, reading is about interpretation and trying to follow the authors text as accurately as possible and there will always be room for misinterpretation, but, so is face to face communication, I don’t think this ‘issue’ is something that needs to be broken down and fixed by studying reading structure and trying to make sure reading is as perceivable as having a conversation with a human.

Reading is an amazing opportunity to understand what is said and imagine what is left unsaid. It’s what I think makes a good author, if an author can give just enough detail to stimulate the mind of the reader but not too much that it takes the fun out of reading and imagining in the first place then that author can give the reader an incredible experience, one that I believe is more dynamic than a conversation between two people. Not to mention that an argument trying to be made here is that reading is complex because of what is left unsaid but the same thing could be said for a face-to-face conversation. We as humans leave things unsaid in conversations all the time and often substitute the unsaid for body language and signals, someone with poor social skills may have an easier time understanding a written 1st person story than having a conversation and hearing the story from said person. It is all about perceptions and interpretation. Another thing that could be added to support this is the divide in a learning setting where some students learn better by reading a textbook and others learn better through lecture and demonstration. One is not better than the other, the only factor that is important is how does the student prefer to learn. This website I have attached below goes into a good amount of detail between example learning and text-learning that it helpful when supporting my point that neither text/reader and in person conversation is better than the other, it is all up to how someone wants to learn and finds the most success. https://elai.io/video-learning-vs-text

Overall, I believe the interaction between text and reader to be complex and multifaceted but I also believe in person conversation to be just as complex. The author of this article (from my understanding) was making a point to explain that face-to-face interaction is less complex than reading a text but I believe both are just as complex as each other in their own multitude of ways.

This article talked all about the transition of writing and how it went from a transcription of speech to a structured system. There was so much debate in the beginning of this transition, especially from Socrates who’s opinions and theories were very oral speech orientated. Socrates believed that writing should just be the transcription of speech, not an actual system with rules. I believe reading and writing to be so much more than just transcribing current events and oral speech. The structured writing system has given people the power to take readers to different worlds and place themselves in situations as if they are truly they’re experiencing it, a good writer can put on a movie inside the readers head. Reading oral transcripts does not have that same ability at all, I also believe that this way of writing would be very hard to learn from. I understand that we watch lectures and listen to others talk to learn things but some things have to be explained in ways that transcribing someone exact words just can’t do. Though this part was interesting, the section that really made me think was the debate of whether sight and hearing were involved in reading or if it is just sight. In the 80s reading was seen as just an ocular activity but recently psychological studies show that there is ocular and oral actions present in the cerebral mechanisms during reading.

I don’t see reading as simply ocular, I hear the words as I read anything. Even as I’m typing this right now I can hear the words before they are being written down. This phenomena is a very hard thing to vocalize and describe, even though I know I cannot hear the words from the outside, it’s as if I have ears on the inside of my head and my subconscious is talking to me saying the words just as I am thinking them. It’s wildly interesting to me that even in the 80s, a time that feels so recent, we had a completely different understanding of the brain and it’s workings. I hope we see more advancements in the field of psychology that explains this everyday occurrence.