Blog post #5: Baron Ch. 1,3 & 5

These three chapters mainly discussed the evolution of writing technologies. Before getting into any of that though, the initial opposition to writing itself was also discussed. The first page of the first chapter actually reiterates things we learned when reading Orality and Literacy. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates warns Phaedrus that writing will cause people to rely less on their memory and become too dependent on writing. He also argued that because of the static nature of written text, there can be no argument about it's content, making it defective and trustworthy. While there is some merit to these arguments, writing of course won out eventually. It was once met with distrust, given how valuable spoken word was in society. But eventually, people came to trust it more especially for their use in official documents.

Although the shift from speech to writing is a technological advancement in and of itself, the advancement didn't stop there. Initially, people wrote on clay tablets that took quite a bit of effort to prepare, write on and preserve. This was eventually abandoned for dried animal skins or papyrus, which were painted upon rather than carved into. This eventually brought about pens, then pencils. In fact, chapter 3 goes very in-depth about how pencils are often overlooked as a technology. Many wouldn't guess that the pencil and it's eraser counterpart were actually met with a lot of opposition. Many teachers used to believe that students should think before they write and be held accountable for their mistakes meaning that crossing out or erasing were prohibited. Obviously, this technology won out as well. Something that is so commonplace in our society and is actually viewed as somewhat antiquated compared to our current means of producing text is not something that we would think could ever be considered controversial in any way, but it just goes to show that there will always be a portion of the population that wants to keep things the way they are and subscribes to the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". I think another factor that plays into that is the learning curve that often accompanies new technologies. People often don't want to put in that much effort initially, or might not even see the use of this new technology. But given a little time, the tables often turn and those same people find themselves dependent on the technology that they initially opposed, which can be seen with other advancements that followed the pencil such as the typewriter, telephone and eventually the computers we now use on a daily basis.