Cultural Litereracies - Nietzsche’s typewriter

Ink and paper ->    Typewriter ->     Computer ->    Internet -> ………….

Media has progressed over the years and although the basic ink and paper is still used, Computers and internet are used by most people largely due to it being the easiest and quickest way of obtaining and documenting information. 

Nietzsche once explained that “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” I absolutely agree that different media’s will alter the outcome of the final product. An example of this would be when writing information, it would take longer with pen and paper in comparison to a computer. This is due to the computer being faster in typing than writing, also with mistakes, the backspace of the computer is far more effortless and neater that an eraser. But when it comes to studying or writing notes in class, I always use pen and paper as it helps remember the info that I am writing, this is due to the fact that it takes longer to write, therefore your brain thinks about the information for a longer time (thus helping in remembering the info) rather than quickly typing and forgetting information on a computer. 

As I am majoring in Urban and regional Planning (city planning) some of the essential knowledge needed for the profession, is to map out city’s on a GIS computer program. The program is used to quickly and accurately get model maps of cities in many different angles. If these maps are drawn out using a pen and paper, the quality would be far less and the map would also be inaccurate, also many different maps would be required to be drawn in order to account for different map angles. Therefor the final product of using a computer program to a pen and paper in relation to map modeling would be far different.

‘Is the improvement of media making us more stupid?’ I am sure that the introduction of spellcheck, thesaurus and grammar check, are making us less observant of our own mistakes and not helping in regard to self-improvement of grammar and spelling, thus making us unable to identify mistakes on our own to fix. But then again the introduction to the internet has made vast amounts of the world’s knowledge just a few clicks away. This ease of access to information would help many people quickly learn larger amounts of information in shorter time, thus helping the human race to gain knowledge.

Overall I think the evolution of media is helping many businesses and persons improve in relation to organization and quality. The internet is helping the human race to become more knowledgeable as a whole and help in making everyday jobs a lot easier and quicker. I believe the human race will become incoherent in regards to spelling and grammar in the future, due to the introduction of spellcheck/ grammar check and hope that pen and paper is always going to be used in order to help these aspects of a human brain.