Synthesis Essay On Technology Analysis

In Michaela Cullington’s article “Does Texting Affect Writing?” she addresses a superstition that the older generation of today believes to be a possible issue. This issue is the potential for texting via cell phones to negatively affect young peoples’ abilities to write correct, formal papers. In her writing, she logically dismissed these accusations by providing proof against this believe while presenting her defense in a persuasive manner.

In Michaela Cullington’s essay titled, “Does Texting Affect Writing?” the author tests the ongoing question of how today’s youth handles the effects of texting in the education system. Using successful evidence from both sides of the argument as well as participating in her own experiment, Cullington is able to fully demonstrate how texting does not interfere with today’s students and their abilities to write formally in the classroom.

Technology has advanced a lot more in the past century than it has over a million years. There is millions of new advancements found every day, however, this is making the younger generation a lot less knowledgeable. In the book The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerkein, it states that the teens today are the dumbest generation to live on the planet. It is commonly believed that the young generation is the least knowledgeable generation because of their great reliability on technology, constant distraction by technology, and negative media influences. Although technology helps to make one’s everyday life a lot easier, it is taking away one’s intelligence.

Not So Fast,” Andrea Lunsford argues that rather than leading to a new illiteracy, the digital technologies in the modern world help students to develop their ability of writing. Not only that students are daferrors than 25 years ago, actually with less spelling errors. In order to help students with the challenges, the teacher should offer solid instructions and encouragement rather than derision.

As R. Smith Simpson says, "My initial surprise was to find among the candidates an abysmal ignorance of so elementary a subject as the geography of the United States" (Source 5, R. Smith Simpson). However, this small knowledge of geography is just one example of a young person's intelligence. This lack of knowledge of geography doesn't point to a lesser intelligence of the younger generation, but rather a lesser need of knowledge. In past generations, people couldn't find out information about the works around at an instant via the Internet. They had to learn facts and memorize them if they wanted to be aware of something. The lack of knowledge of geographical information shown in some cases by today's youth points to easier ways of finding out information, instead of young people being dumber than their

Along with the progression of society, major advances have been made in hundreds of different fields — particularly technology. Controversy has risen, and debates ensued over whether today's young Americans are really “the dumbest generation,” due to their “money, media, e-gadgets, and career plans” [Source A]. While advances have been made, they have brought with them resources to benefit off of, and ultimately assist in the overall intellect and intelligence of the human race.

Over the course of time technology has changed society’s views on various topics. In The Dumbest generation, Mark Bauerlein makes the argument that the youth generation is less knowledgeable than the older generation. This is not necessarily the case because the youth generation do not feel the need to know facts such as “who wrote the oratorio “Messiah” (which 35 percent of college seniors knew in 2002, compared with 56 percent in 1955) (Source B). As mentioned previously this is not by any means indicating that the youth generation is less knowledgeable, but instead shows that they have other resources to find out this information rather than just knowing it. Also, not knowing facts that were once very important to the older generations does

It is believed by many that younger generations, those under the age of thirty are the “dumbest”. Apparently, technology has now influenced and molded people into less-intelligent individuals who lack the knowledge and skills that people of the same age once acquired. Though if we look at more aspects of their learning capabilities, millennials do have the potential to be bright beings, now seen through more creative, non-traditional ways. And because of this, younger generations cannot be undermined as they have high levels of cognitive abilities, the help from technology, and how technology makes them write more and be more involved with their interests. Younger generations are not limited in their cognitive abilities, rather these abilities are expanding as time progresses.

Bauerlein claims, “Young Americans have much more access and education than their parents did, but in the 2007 Pew survey on ‘What Americans Know:1989-2007,’ 56 percent of 18- to 29- year-olds possessed low knowledge levels, while only 22 percent of 50- to 64- year-olds did”(Bauerlein). This allusion to a Pew survey shows that more under 30’s are dumb, this is believed to be because of this generation’s access to new technology. Even though the older generations may have had less information they showed up smarter, this is because instead of having all information easy at the finger-tips they had to read and learn. Even with all of the technology they have, this

In his best-selling book The Dumbest Generation, professor and social critic Mark Bauerlein makes the statement that “those under thirty comprise the dumbest generation in modern history.” Which is a wildly distorted statement, surely the millennials don’t remember as much facts as there parental generations did but to call them the dumbest generation is completely absurd. In fact the under 30 generations perform better than the previous generations in many areas of intellect. Perhaps making them one of the smartest generations ever, with the highest IQ levels, there focus on accessing information and how there leading a literacy revolution.

Clive Thompson’s “On the New Literacy” discusses the argument that technology is causing our youth’s writing skills to decline. He starts by mentioning a study that shows writing has actually improved and is having a re-birthing of sorts. Andrea Lunsford, A writing professor at Stanford University, ran the study, collecting nearly 15,000 student writings ranging from class assignments to blog posts. She discovered Stanford students were writing outside of the classroom 38 percent of the time and due to the internet, these writings had a bigger audience, which in effect made the students writing better. He states that Stanford students were less enthused about in-class writing because the only audience would be their teacher

If students do not use technology in high school, they don’t learn the proper way to handle technology. When students go to college, they will miss important things like notes and lectures because they are too busy trying to pull

Also, students today can talk with their teachers from home, and learn all the information from the Internet and finish a research assignment that used to take days because of books, in a matter of hours. But, students of the newer generations seem to have many problems with writing complete sentences or spelling words because of the frequent usage of text messages and the many hundreds of acronyms used to shorten texts. But besides memory problems, technology usage can cause serious diseases as well.

The popularity of technology is growing larger and faster than ever. The problem is, we may never be able to catch up to it. The young adolescent adults seemed to be more interested in technology. Some experts claim that it does more harm than value. In terms of education, technology is becoming more and more popular and used among many school districts, although this can come with complications and allows students to ease threw assignments without having to fix their own problems. Also, technology can affect teenagers social abilities and let strangers have access to personal information.

There is no doubt that technology has advanced tremendously in the last half-century. Technology has provided extraordinary improvements to our world; being an endless source of entertainment and nonstop communication anywhere at any time. But are these technological advancements a good thing? The youth of today are constantly immersed in these technological advancements whether through cell phones, gaming systems, or laptops. As technology continues to advance it is negatively affecting our health, communication skills, and the education of youth.