From Pencils to Pixels
I think a lot of us today take technology for granted, myself included. I never really sat and thought about the labor that went into creating computers, or telephones, or even something that I thought was so simple, as a pencil. It’s mind blowing to read this article living in such a technology-advanced world that I live in today.
It doesn’t take much for us now to pick up a pen or pencil and rip out a piece of paper and go to it. Baron says in his reading that writing wasn’t such an easy process as it is today, and it’s almost hard to imagine that. He states, “Of course writing never spread very greatly in the ancient world. William Harris (1989) argues convincingly that no more than ten percent of the classical Greek or Roman populations could have been literate. One reason for this must be that writing technology remained both cumbersome and expensive: writing instruments, paints, and inks had to be handmade, and writing surfaces like clay tablets, wax tablets, and papyrus had to be laboriously prepared. Writing therefore remained exclusive, until cheap paper became available, and the printing press made mass production of written texts more affordable and less labor-intensive.” It’s crazy to think of all the labor and expense that was put into the act of simply writing. I think today I could probably find a notepad and a pack of pencils for like $2.00 at Walmart. Baron actually does state at the end of this article that, "Pencil technology has advanced to the point where the ubiquitous no. 2 wood-cased pencil can be manufactured for a unit cost of a few pennies." It makes it a hard idea to grasp that it was once an expensive and labor-intensive process, when we find these tools just about anywhere we go now. I can’t imagine being like, “Hold on let me go prepare some papyrus so I can write down my list for groceries I need to get.” Not to mention, that we now have Apps on our phones that can create lists for us.
Today, we have Smartphones, that will probably one day be able to drive our cars for us. We have Ipads and Ipods, E-books, kindles, the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft Word. I mean, the list goes on and on. It really is wild to see how far we've come in this digital world, and I'm sure we haven't even seen half of it yet.
P.S. If I had to type a paper on that WordStar program, I would've never made it. The image that Baron showed of Wordstar literally gave me a headache just looking at it. It looked like hieroglyphics.
I think a lot of us today take technology for granted, myself included. I never really sat and thought about the labor that went into creating computers, or telephones, or even something that I thought was so simple, as a pencil. It’s mind blowing to read this article living in such a technology-advanced world that I live in today.
It doesn’t take much for us now to pick up a pen or pencil and rip out a piece of paper and go to it. Baron says in his reading that writing wasn’t such an easy process as it is today, and it’s almost hard to imagine that. He states, “Of course writing never spread very greatly in the ancient world. William Harris (1989) argues convincingly that no more than ten percent of the classical Greek or Roman populations could have been literate. One reason for this must be that writing technology remained both cumbersome and expensive: writing instruments, paints, and inks had to be handmade, and writing surfaces like clay tablets, wax tablets, and papyrus had to be laboriously prepared. Writing therefore remained exclusive, until cheap paper became available, and the printing press made mass production of written texts more affordable and less labor-intensive.” It’s crazy to think of all the labor and expense that was put into the act of simply writing. I think today I could probably find a notepad and a pack of pencils for like $2.00 at Walmart. Baron actually does state at the end of this article that, "Pencil technology has advanced to the point where the ubiquitous no. 2 wood-cased pencil can be manufactured for a unit cost of a few pennies." It makes it a hard idea to grasp that it was once an expensive and labor-intensive process, when we find these tools just about anywhere we go now. I can’t imagine being like, “Hold on let me go prepare some papyrus so I can write down my list for groceries I need to get.” Not to mention, that we now have Apps on our phones that can create lists for us.
Today, we have Smartphones, that will probably one day be able to drive our cars for us. We have Ipads and Ipods, E-books, kindles, the Internet, YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft Word. I mean, the list goes on and on. It really is wild to see how far we've come in this digital world, and I'm sure we haven't even seen half of it yet.
P.S. If I had to type a paper on that WordStar program, I would've never made it. The image that Baron showed of Wordstar literally gave me a headache just looking at it. It looked like hieroglyphics.