Unit 1 Reflection

I think my sources were quality. All of them came from reputable sources, and all of the people seemed to have a mastery of the subjects they were discussing. The first source I chose was an interview between two professors at the University of Basel discussing how technology has changed reading, writing, and literature in general. One of the professors, Phillip Schweighauser, talks about how writing has changed with technology, and I thought a lot of it was very poignant. He says "Technological innovations have radically impacted human language and expression throughout history of humankind. Think the invention of the phonetic alphabet in the 2nd millennium BCE, think of the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century, think of the invention of the telephone, the typewriter and the tape machine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All of these technologies have fundamentally changed the way humans lived their lives, communicated, and perceived their world." (Metzger). This was a common theme throughout the sources, and I find it really interesting, also appearing in From Pencils to Pixels and my third source, which specifically looked at this phenomenon. In that article, the author references Fredrich Nietzsche and his writings on this as he transitioned to a new medium of writing as his eyesight declined, which at the time was a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. Nietzsche said that our writing instruments influence our writing by making us think differently than we would if we were using something different. This whole thing reminds me a lot of Sapir-Wharf Hypothesis from the film Arrival, which states that the language we speak influences our thoughts and decisions. In the movie, a linguist learns an alien language which changes her entire perception of time, and although that is obviously science-fiction, the hypothesis is an actual thing, also known as linguistic relativity, and there have been lots of studies done around it. I think there is something similar with writing, as Nietzsche and others have alluded to, with how and what we are writing on influence the final product. My third source was different from the others, as not only was it presented in a visual and auditory medium, but also in it's content. It was still reputable, since in order to give a TED Talk, you have to have been approved and have a lot of knowledge about your given topic, and Cecilia Knapp, who gave the talk I watched, certainly has that. She is a poet, so she regularly practices writing, and is also a performer and writes her own shows. She has a different perspective than a lot of the other people I looked at, and it was really interesting to hear her thoughts on writing as more of an outlet than an academic endeavor, which is how it was looked at in my other sources. I think technology played a pretty big role on my project, seeing as it was done almost exclusively online, and a lot of these sources wouldn't have been available to me many years ago. I think my sources lack a common man source in a sense, as all of them are from people who are really invested in writing and what it means, so I would be interested to see how people who are similar to myself view the intersection between writing and technology. I would be very interested in seeing how people of different ages are affected by the technology, since my generation has only really known the digital age, and I would like to see how people who experienced typewriters think things have changed, and their thoughts on whether or not that is a good thing. I think it is important to see what, if any, difference the average person sees in writing now compared to with prior technologies, since a lot of the time we only see the views of those writing articles and sharing their opinions, which may not reflect the general public. I certainly think that these sources can be used going forward. Given the similarities between three of them, I think that could be a direction in which my research moves in Unit 2 as I go on and look at some more of the influence that technology has on writing, a lot of these sources could be used, specifically the third source I chose, since there is a lot of interesting stuff in there about writing and technology, and the intersection between the two. After Unit 1, I think my path is beginning to become more clear and I am more prepared to continue going on and looking at the inquiry in what is hopefully a different and an interesting way.