Week 2 readings

This week we had three readings that set the groundwork for understanding how people perceive words and writings within the higher education world. They were all different in what they talked about but were all equally interesting to read.

The first reading I looked at was "Writing reconstructs consciousness." This was a very interesting read and made me think in a way I hadn't before about how writing changed the entire game of history. This article argues how some writing can be considered not as important or valuable as spoken word because you cannot understand the way in which the writer is saying them because they are written on paper. I thought that was interesting coming from a world that is surrounded by writing and especially since in our last class we discussed how getting work published makes you a more accomplished scholar. So reading that was indeed the opposite of how many of us feel in today's world about writing. There is a quote I highlighted within this reading that I thought was very meaningful: "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness." I really agree with these sentences that were in the first bit of the reading. Writing, as the article states, transformed our world and we were able to retain knowledge in a more secure way instead of orally passing it down, it left a way for us to be able to look back on history and understand people of a different time and world from our own and learn from it. Plato disagreed with this thought and stated that it was attempting to state outside of the mind what was in the mind and that was inhuman. I thought this was interesting considering he was having someone write that somewhere for him. The bulk of the article discusses as well the forming of alphabets and languages and it made me thankful I didn't have to learn Chinese back int he day because it would apparently take you almost your lifespan to learn it all! Another excerpt I really found interesting from this reading was on page 100 and it says "For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive." I think that is most definitely a great observation to make. Something else I found interesting was a sentence on page 102. It says "There is no equivalent for this in an oral performance, no way to erase a spoken word: corrections do not remove an infelicity or an error, they merely supplement it that denial and patchwork." This jumped out at me because it reminded me of when I was younger and my mother would always tell me to be careful what I said because it was like a tube of toothpaste; I could say it but couldn't take it back after it was said no matter how much a wanted to. I feel like this gives written word an advantage over spoken because you can erase and rephrase as many times as you need until it is the way you want it.

The next article I read was "Do artifacts have politics." This article was very interesting to me because it made me think of things such a roadways and bridges in a completely different way. In one of the sections I highlighted it says " What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded." It goes on to explain that technology is not just made for the advancement of man but we must remember in what circumstances the technology was developed. It gives an example of Robert Moses, who developed bridges, roads and parks in New York. It states that if you go to Long Island you will notice the overpasses are lower than a normal overpass. The reason is because he intentionally made them that way so that public transit or other big vehicles couldn't come onto the island. This is because he was racially prejudiced and had a social class bias and it was his way of "keeping those other people out." I thought that was very interesting because it had never occurred to me to think of the intention behind why such things as that are built. People can most definitely use their power over technology by using its development to hinder those they do not like. This does in fact show that artifacts have politics (tiny p politics not Politics) and that they then influence the world around them thus making them form to their ways of doing.

The last article for this week was "Always already new." This discusses the impact of media on the different mediums especially social media and the internet. On page 5 the author talks about media being historical on different levels. She outlines that first media are themselves denizens of the past. This means that the media, no matter how new it is, had to come from somewhere and had to go through testing to be able to make sure the new media was workable. The second thing she outlines is media are historical because they are functionally integral to a sense of pastness. This means that using media usually involves encountering the past in order to produce what they are trying to seek out. The third thing she outlines is media as scientific instruments of a society at large.This is basically saying for instance, I am typing on a computer, I am focusing on what I am typing and not focusing on how the computer is even powered, how it works, how it knows what to put on the screen, and so on. I am ignoring the huge scientific hurdles that were overcome to create and maintain this computer and I am using it for what I need. It also takes this a step further by explaining how media do things. Such as shape society, It is giving life to the word media, not the people such as the writers, producers, etc but to the form of medium itself such as television or internet. As if these non-thinking things can produce these results without humans.

All three of these articles took completely different roads to help form an overall opinion of where technology came from, why it is important, how people change the way we use certain aspects of technology and society for their own personal opinions with us even being aware of the why. It shows us that writing is indeed very important even if it did have some naysayers in the beginning stages of development and it shows how we as a society have become so used to the technologies around us we forget to appreciate just how much goes in to making things such as computers, and smart phones work.