Dennis Baron’s piece, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology reminded me of just that: the now almost invisible literacy technologies that have emerged over time. I remember when I was a grade school student and learning how to form perfectly copied letters on blue and pink striped paper with a pencil. Because writing letters (and not sentences or even words) was more of an art form in those days, the pencil was used so that a young student could easily correct a squiggly cursive z or a backwards s. Once we graduated from handwriting class onto forming sentences, the pencil was still used, but the teacher held the eraser. By the time I hit the fourth grade and was expected to craft impeccable five-paragraph essays on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the pencil was taken away and the pen was the only tool one could use, for an advanced literate uses a pen, not a pencil. Banks always reject checks written in pencil, and forget receiving compensation from a settlement statement signed in anything other than black or blue ink. I’d forgotten the debates that have continually surrounded the use of the pencil as a literacy tool until I read Baron’s article.
He also reminded me of the controversy surrounding the typewriter or (more relevant) the word processor. My creative writing workshops have conjured up old superstitions about writing poetry on a computer. For many the idea of creating an artwork that is supposed to be a piece of their soul with a keyboard hooked up to machine is pure ludicrous! Writing with one’s own hand is the only way to get pure and honest results. Strikeouts and ink blots (and for users of the pencil, shadows of the original ideas left behind the new words), speak of a kind of organicism of the work. And yet, how many of these texts get published in their original formats? I’ve never seen it. Unless of course we’re looking at Shakespearean foils or Da Vinci blueprints or any Medieval or ancient piece of literature. But to think of these in their original contexts – well, then they were created using the latest technology! For Shakespeare the quill and ink on what was then mightily expensive paper was the Renaissance equivalent of our word processor. It seems absurd to believe incredible and honestly ingenious work cannot be achieved using the keyboard and the monitor. I suppose it’s just too bizarre for us to imagine the lone genius beside the river in the woods creating Eve of St. Agnes with a laptop. But then again, our kids probably won’t think the same way we do now.
The word processor seems to certainly be moving in the same direction as the pen, for professors tend to refuse to accept final term papers in any other form but typed text, and notes are more often taken on a laptop than in a notebook (hence, the notebook computer). I can’t imagine compiling a research paper without the Internet, the cut-and-paste feature, or the “undo” function. It must have taken my parents months to do what I can do in mere hours! It would be interesting to see how differently Baron would have written his piece if it had been written in 2010 instead of in 1999. We’ve come quite a ways since then. The iphone, ipad, ipod, Android, mp3, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blackberry, Xbox Live, Google, Dictionary.com, YouTube, Blackboard, and a google of other advancements are all in constant use and are all literacy tools we tend to take for granted in our age of information. As technologies are discovered and developed throughout our own lifetime and on into our grandchildren’s, who knows – perhaps the pencil and paper will be their marks in the sand.
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