I found this article titled, “11 Problems People Had in the ’00s” on the website, Buzzfeed. The 11 problems highlight how changes in technology affect the way society views everyday life. The article reminds me of a comment in Howard’s book discussing how time and technology affected people’s preferences of fonts:
“…within fifty years of this work, the attractiveness of scribal handwriting gave way to the clarity of more utilitarian scripts” (63).
Technology has greatly affected how students view the college experience as writing technology has changed quite a lot over the years. My parents always talk about writing papers on typewriters, and how they had to be extremely careful not to have any typos. Computers and Microsoft Word technology has completely changed the way students view assignments. I oftentimes make mistakes when writing, but technology fixes those mistakes.
It is interesting to think of how things have changed in regards to the methods of writing. With the rise in popularity of tablet devices, could it be possible that computers will be replaced as the preferred method to complete assignments with? After all, these devices can be equipped with stylus devices similar to pens. Perhaps the next wave of writing will pay homage to earlier forms in this way.
My parents are always amazed at the amount of homework I had in high school, especially the amount of research papers and essays I was required to write, not to mention scientific projects and worksheets. We realized that since they didn’t have the internet in their day, accessing such a vast amount of information was only available through the library, and the amount of time it would take to comb through books and books just to find a few sentences of information was drastically reduced with the invention of Google. Because of this rapid availability of information, it was evident that as students, we were expected to do more work because information was so readily available to us. It seems that with each new generation, more and more will be expected of them as technology progresses and it becomes increasingly easier to do tasks which had been considered tedious and time-consuming back in our parents day.
When i write papers Microsoft Word is correcting at least a few words or sentences per paragraph without me even noticing; let alone the red and green underlines. I could not imagine typing with a type writer where I must spell every word precisely and remain mistake free grammatically. I even just spelled grammatically incorrectly and control clicked it and simply chose the first option. My education is completely dependent upon technology..
My parents always talk about writing their papers on typewriters as well, and they made it clear to me at a young age that they believed typewriters were superior to computers. They always talked about how much they loved hearing the sound a typewriter makes when you press down a button, and even saved an old typewriter for me to play with when I was young so that I could experience this for myself.
I was wondering the same thing while writing my paper. The fact that students used to have typewriters and couldn’t make a mistake and if they did they would have to start all over on that page is mind numbing. I make many typos in each of my papers but can fix them at the click of a button. I can’t imagine writing a paper fifty or sixty years ago.