I Read This Is Technological Advances Have Shaped This Era Into What It Is Today?

Birkerts provides three effects that will occur as a result of moving away from the printed word to the electronic media. The first effect is the language erosion. He explains the reader that transition from books will lead to the “complexity and distinctiveness of verbal and written communication, which are deeply bound to transaction of print literacy, will gradually be replaced by a more telegraphic sort of plainspeak” (9). In the future our language will start to become more simple and dumb. Whereas, by reading books and printed materials people are able to dig more depth and understand and imagine the contents. But, soon this will start to disappear as people will no longer be able to understand the complex language of the literature and intelligence level of people will start to decrease. The second effect of electronic media is the flattening of historical perspectives. This means that due to the electronic media the history will start to recede because the “printed page itself is a link” and when this link is broken the past will gradually diminish (10). Birkerts explains the audience that the past is best represented in the books and libraries. Therefore, moving away from the printed word means moving away from the past and its history. The last effect is the waning of the private self. Birkerts worries that in the future people will forget how to live because of the electronic

Larissa MacFarquhar’s essay titled,“Who Cares if Johnny Can’t Read?” , was published in the Slate magazine in 1997, rebuts the misconception that Americans in today’s society don’t read as much as people did in the past. MacFarquhar presented factual information to back up her claim that Americans do read and that they read more now than they ever did. In addition, people do not read classics as much as they read genre fiction and self-help in today’s society. MacFarquhar also stated that reading books is better than television. According to MacFarquhar, she believed that reading can stimulate emotions and allow people to participate unlike television. Later, she acknowledged that certain television can also stimulate emotions and allow people

Communication with our society and the aptitude for reading has been transformed by the Internet as we, no matter who we are or what we use, adapt to the mechanism of technology and become a less intelligent, shallow community. Due to the many hours we spend on our electronic devices and the fast-paced reading we’ve adjusted to, our brains have become psychologically less perceptive of how the Internet is affecting our everyday lives. We need to make note of our daily habits and how much time we spend online, for the Internet will continue to affect generation after

Dana Giona persuades his audience on how the decline of reading in America will impact society negatively by incorporating a precise set of diction usage and including irony in his article.

　　In the essay “Reading and Thought”, Dwight MacDonlad talked about the kind of poor reading people are attached to in modern society. MacDonald believed reading materials such as Times and New York Times are too overwhelming for the readers. Readers tend to skim through the reading materials because most of the reading do not have any connections with their daily lives. Moreover, MacDoanld claimed that the readings people do these days are not thoughtful. The readings are rather irrelevant toward the readers. It is because the journalists to produce dull pieces of readings which are meant to be skimmed through without having too much thoughts involved. As the journalists do not have much consideration of the materials they produced. To the journalists the readings they produce are just a series of news that should be read driftly and left behind with no thoughful idea needed to be informed. These effects caused modern society to have a poor reading habits because people do not reflect and give time to think about the readings they did. Readers casually accept the readings even though they do not have provide any resourceful information for the readers.

Browsing the internet contrasts sharply with reading from a book. The internet is not intended to be read; it is meant to be scanned hastily for relevant information. In Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows, Joe O’Shea, a Rhodes scholar, writes that reading books “is not a good use of my time, as I can get all the information I need faster through the web” (Carr, 9). O’Shea believes books are “superfluous” because of the efficiency of the internet (Carr, 9). They must be read carefully in order to find relevant information, but the internet allows one to, “cherry-pick the pertinent passages using Google Book Search” (Carr, 8). Carr writes, “we’re no longer guided toward a deep, personally constructed understanding of the text’s connotations” (166). Internet users do not have to think deeply about the meaning of an online text

Austin, PhD and Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University, believes that social media is the largest purveyor of disconcerting trends seen in readers. He claims in his Psychology Today feature entitled "Want a Better Life? Read a Book" that the punchy / quick lived nature of online media can be droning and inescapable, causing its users to accept preconceived opinions rather than critically analyzing a text using their personal rationale. For those like Austin, the increasing prevalence of social networking has not only altered the way in which we read, but the way in which we

According to the United Nations Agency, approximately 3.2 billion people have used the Internet since 2015, which has made a drastic increase since 2000 with there only being 738 million internet users then. That is almost 43% of the world's population that uses the internet. A controversial topic that is commonly being brought up in today's arguments is the use of the internet and how people believe it is becoming such a detriment to our society, because nobody in this generation acknowledges the value of books, or even prefers to use an actual copy such as a paperback. The internet, such as Google, is being classified as lazy or ignorant, but reading a book is labeled as literate or being knowledgeable. Thesis:“Teaching in the #Age Literacy” by Jennifer L. Nelson and “Is Google Making Us stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, both analyze the pros and cons to having the internet and information at our fingertips, how it is affecting the way we read and analyze text and different scientific experiments that have been put to use to decode why we think the way we do now and how to improve our intelligence.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. says, "I am not alone.” He continues, “There are at least two of us who have forgotten how to read." He doesn't mean that people have forgotten how to read; rather people have forgotten how to become one with the text. There is more than one person who feels that concentration becomes blurred when the text in front of one requires full attention. Short ads and topics one finds interesting are usually easier to read than intellectual books that are imposed on one. It's a little funny, isn’t it?

“Reading on the Web is not really Reading” by Susan Jacoby explores how a younger generation does not take in as much information as generations that did not have as much technology. Jacoby tries to persuade the reader to believe that a generation with technology around every corner is not as intelligent or hardworking as a generation without any technology. She does this through logos and pathos but fails to use credible sources,contradicts herself and in the end does not prove her main argument. Jacoby hesitates to prove her point that reading on the web is not truly reading but instead tries to intimidate the reader to believe that technology in the younger generation has caused intelligence to decrease.

In “Why Don’t Teens Read For Pleasure Like They Used To?,” Jennifer Ludden a writer from Mind/Shift, KQED.org explains why many teens aren’t reading for pleasure anymore. A study done by Common Sense Media, shows that “Nearly half of 17-year-olds say they read for pleasure no more than one or times a year - if that.” Ludden states that with the digital revolution, there are more platforms than ever to read on. Even though the number of American teens reading for pleasure has dramatically. Additionally, Jim Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, says he’s been studying the impact of technology on children.

Wattenburg’s text addresses the issues regarding the aging of the regular printed medium readers. He regards “What has happened in recent years is that relatively few young adults have picked up this habit,”(Watternberg 8) the habit of reading newspapers as

The way of learning and reading has changed dramatically over many generations because of new technological advances. Learning is the knowledge acquired through experience, study, or being taught. In Birkerts essay, he explains that learning and how we gather information has changed over time. He says newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels are things that are around individuals every day. These are things that individuals will read to gain knowledge of certain things that are going on. For example, individuals will read labels on food items to see what the food is made out of because some individuals are allergic to certain ingredients and need to know this information. Time has changed the way individuals learn. Learning at one time was all from books and individuals taking notes on those books. Years ago, books were rare and that is what individuals used to learn and when they had a book they had to take out all they could from that book. Learning has gone from just books to many different ways of receiving information. Today’s big new way of learning is from the internet. Individuals have gone from staring at a book for hours to typing a question they have into the internet and getting results back from many sources. Birkerts describes this in his essay, “As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed-as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen-it may be time to ask how

Nowadays, there are thousands of books available free on the Internet, and people find them easy to read the book online instead of getting the hard copy of the book. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr explains that the online readings make it becomes difficult for us to pay full attention to the reading “The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing”(7). For example, when I have to read the articles from the Internet for my research papers or class assignments, I always have hard time focus on the reading because I easily get distracted by the ads shown on the pages. I start paying attention to the ads instead of understanding and absorb the information. Carr also states that “For some people, the very idea of reading a book has come to seem old-fashioned, maybe even little silly- like sewing your own shirts or butchering your own meat”(8). In these days, people find it boring to read books, especially young adults, they think it is a waste of time to read books when they can get the short versions of reading from the Internet instead of reading a page to

INTRO SENTENCE While many others argue that the human race has regressed, perhaps the least challenged, and least acknowledged, viewpoint is that the human race has neither progressed nor regressed, but in fact has stayed the same. There have been technological advancements made, many of which impact human interaction, they do not impact human nature. The progress of a group of people cannot be measured as if it was an experiment, because there are too many independent variables. Human nature varies and is ever changing, especially when the conditions of this experiment are limited to such a large area. The human race has changed, no doubt, but change cannot be classified so linearly; it is not something that is black and white. Change is not the difference between progression and regression, but is something that builds, swells, and falls and, more often than not, despite everything, it ends up falling somewhere along the same line that it was born from. It for this reason that humanity has regressed. Despite the fact that humanity sometimes surges forward with progress, and occasionally jumps backward with regress, it tends to stay the same. It is often said that choosing no side is choosing the side of the oppressor, while quite similarly, lack of progression is regression.