As a millennial, it has been interesting growing up with all of the technologic interfaces we casually deal with on a daily basis. Unlike the generation before us, we know nothing else besides having various options to communicate, whether it be online, in person, or even through letters by mail. For example, before cell phones and laptops were a casual occurrence, before even house phones were around, writing or typing letters was the most common form of communication. Nowadays, we have endless means of communication options, whether it’s writing letters and using the postal system, or sending a quick voice message to you friend on your fresh iPhone 360s Super Siri.
So the following describes my daily activities pertaining to when and how I write or relay information via text. While attending school, the only thing used to document information during lectures are my pen and paper. I never attempted to use my laptop as a means of note taking, or found it required during school hours. Plus the hassle of hauling it carefully around campus all day seems exhausting. Also, using a laptop in my calculus class would be extremely difficult, considering I would have to go through so much trouble to type in an integral or an exponent. Overall, access to pen and paper is the most efficient and sufficient method for documenting notes at school. This method involves me physically writing down every word, engraving details in my brain, making it more of a personal process of learning by writing. In my opinion, physically writing is preferred as opposed to typing letters through a laptop or an iPhone when it comes to note taking because it is more of a personal experience and helps engrave memories when writing.
Side note, this same day during one of my classes, a PowerPoint that I had been unable to print previously was being reviewed. I decided to pull it up on my phone to follow while going over the PowerPoint in class. (Keep in mind my normal route for accessing school information is my laptop, not my phone. It took five minutes to pull up the ulink website, and when it finally loaded I was given an error due to the campus’ network. I had to continuously refresh the page until it went through. Then, while clicking around tabs from ulink to moodle, it seemed as if there were far too many tedious steps to go through for something that could be done much easier on a larger platform such as a laptop or a computer. After much lost patience, I decided to just access the PowerPoint at a later time when I got home.
Arriving home after school, I open my laptop to print what needed to be printed. After, I opened Facebook and decided to respond to a couple of unread messages that had been put off for a while. One of my messages was from an elementary school friend, who had attached a comedic video containing reenactments from a college campus.
I later realized my response to him was overall a bit informal in general, but i knew it was appropriate for him considering our past friendship. When I responded, it was as if I were talking to him in person, which was very comfortably and with no filter for grammar or punctuation. Ironically, after that I proceeded to log onto my student email and send an email to my professor regarding a question for class. As I formulated my message to my teacher, I realized it was the complete opposite to the message I had just sent to my friend. This message was structured, well thought out, and not exactly something that would originally roll off of my tongue during a typical conversation. I had type efficiently, to the point with perfected grammar and punctuation. This contrast of messaging made me realize that I have been conformed to what society is becoming, which is one that is integrated with technology. Using acronyms and misspelling words to prevent typing a couple letters less than the word gets has become what society is used to. There are many negative ways we are impacted by over relying on technology as our form of writing. Thinking back on how I struggled to use my phone to do that same task as my laptop when trying to access school information via online, I realized that regardless of it being accessible or not, the content of my messages would consist of the same information. In other words, whether I was on a phone or a laptop to send my teacher an email, I would have still been formal about it. And whether or not I was on my phone or laptop responding to my friend on Facebook, I would have most likely stayed informal.
So how this technologic integration has in our life’s changed my form of writing? It is hard to say considering I was born at the brink of this very technologies existence. The fact that people my age grew up with technology being to popularly integrated in our life’s helps us prosper and accept technology well as opposed to the generation before ours, who had adjusted to living life without having technology in the beginning, but are having to accept such drastic advances in technology as an everyday thing.
Literature & the Internet 