The first essay

How does the new technology affect us campus literature?

By

Naitong Li

                                In Partial Fulfillment of Requirement for Instructor Eric Leake

 For the writing class

January 29, 2012

Introduction: This essay is written for calling attentions to the changes that the new technologies make on our campus literature.  It shows both the good and bad influences about the new technologies, which can cause us to think deeply about it. The main audiences for this essay are the students like us. We can see us situation clearly and try to change it better after reading this article.  

With the extensive application of computers and Internet, network literature, as a new literary style comes into people’s lives, and spreads out at an alarming rate. It affects and changes people’s traditional impressions and habits of literature. As a significant part of the whole literature culture, campus literature also be affected by it a lot and has many profound changes. More and more people start to ask a question: whether the new technology gives a good impaction on our campus literature? In my opinion, anything has its good and bad sides, so we can’t simple to say it is good or bad. We must think the issue comprehensive before we get a conclusion.

The first advantage that new technologies bring us is convenience. The main carrier of the traditional literature is paper media. Compared with e-books, paper books are more bulky, take more space, harder to carry and save. Students can hardly always bring a thick book with them because the textbooks, notebooks are already very heavy, most of them don’t want to put any other things to their bags.  Besides, if there are just paper-books in the world, people must decide which book to buy or to borrow before they start to read it, which will limit their choices. And the cost of changing decision is very high. Thanks to the technologies, we solve these problems. Now, we can download anything that we want to read in our iphone, ipad, and computer, they can contain a small library at the same time, and don’t increase any weight of our bags. We can bring them everywhere, and read them whenever we want. In this way, we can save a lot time for reading. In modern times, reading never needs a desk or even a chair; we can read when we are standing in a line, when we are eating or even when we are in the restroom. We must say that it is the new technology gives us students more opportunities to read. Furthermore, from an environmental perspective, the product of paper media requires a lot of wood, and always creates toxic water and air, so it has an inescapable responsibility to the environmental damage and pollution. Of course, we don’t have the same worried about the network literature.  

Second, the new technologies give us students more chances to write. There are lot of new platforms for writing on Internet, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion bar. Even we are still not professional writers, we can also find others to share our works on the Internet.  Just as Thompson writes in his article “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” that “…young people today writes far more than any generation before them.” They write their feelings about lives in blog, write recommendations for things on YouTube and Amazon, and keep the tracks of their lives by writing on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it is the first generation who are crazing about writing. We like to do it, because writing is never a hard and lonely job today. We can easily get our readers and fans to share our thinking and words and can get responds directly and quickly from them, which motivate us to write. But in thirties years ago, the situation is totally different, just those famous writers have their readers, and even for them, it is also not easy. Most of them should wait for a long time to publish their works. Like Sullivan writes, “Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence”. So, for a nameless writer, he can hardly get readers, though he has a very good production.  Many people lose their interests in writing because of that. But nowadays, even us, just high school or college students, we can publish our work easily, because what we need to do is just click of the Post button on the Web, then everyone in the world can see our words, if we write something really meaningful and great, it can spread out quickly. It is very easy and free, and the feeling about knowing that there exists someone in the world who has a same thinking with you is fantastic.  So in some degree, the new technologies enrich our campus literature.  They make us like writing.

Third, the new technologies make literature more colorful than before, when we read on the Internet, it always provides us many pictures and videos that related to the writings, so that we can understand what we read better. Today, because the high speed of life, time is limited, more and more audiences choose to watch movie or TV series rather than read books.  But the network literature makes words more brilliant, more interesting, and the combine of graphic and text reduces the boring part of traditional literature. Internet helps literature become popular among young students, because it makes it plain and easier for them to comprehend the core idea for a book.

After look at the advantage parts, we should also pay some attentions to the negative impacts the Internet do on our campus literature.

First, when writers write on the Internet, they don’t need to think too much. Unlike other publication writers, the writers on the Internet have less responsibility for their words.  They can write before events settled and a clear pattern emerges. As Sullivan writes: “We blog now-as news reaches us, as facts emerge.” Because there is no one to edit a bloggers’ blogs, the content of them are always personal and extreme, which brings bad influence to students. Because at their age, they can hardly figure out what is right and what is not.  Furthermore, there are many pornography and violence on the Internet, which is not good for teenagers.

The second, the information on the Internet often be edited so that it can attract your attention quickly, so the information here usually not very exactly and often shorter. Furthermore, because the information we can get very easily, we usually don’t treasure it, and always don’t read it carefully, which makes us miss a lot of important materials. It is a big problem today that students become custom to ask Google when they have questions rather than go to library to find answers. We all know that the information on the Internet is edit by second hand, which contains lots of wrong. What’s more, more and more students begin to copy from the Internet or buy papers from it to finish their assignments. These habits which brought by the new technologies to students are badly harmful for their academic studying. 

The third is the biggest problem, because students are custom to the fast and quick reading habit, most of them lose many meaningful things in reading. I have a same feel like the author Carr, ”The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” , this is a big problem, especially for students who need to read a lot when they are studying. Carr uses a very vivid metaphor sentence to describe the change. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ” It is true, most of us feel that the more we use internet, the hard we can focus on a long piece of writing, it changes our reading habit gradually. In the end, we have a high-quantity reading habit, but also a Low-quality reading one. In some degree, Internet reading makes us lose some reading habits. It weakens our capacity of deep reading and makes rich mental connection with the author.  It leads to a poor concentration when we reading.  We never do marginal notes when we read.  

What’s more, there is also a problem that the culture gap situation is more and more obvious among students. We really need to concern about the losing of our culture today. Now, more and more students use network language. They are full of the campus literature. Besides, because students can use smilies and graph to show their feelings easily on the Internet, and when they need to describe a thing they can use a link to replace it, the description ability for a student today is gradually decreasing. For example, in China, there are many new words be created on the Internet, they appears on the Internet, magazines, TV, and any other media products. You can hear a same again and again in one day. People’ vocabulary seems become smaller and many old but beautiful words will never be used today. This situation is more serious among students. It is a problem for the campus literature.

From then on, we know that network not only has positive impacts on our campus literature, but also creates some negative influences. It just like a Chinese proverb says, "We can’t get fish and bear’s paw at the same time." So though the Internet has a lot of advantages, we still need to pay attention to it. What we should do is trying to take good use of the advantages that the new technologies bring us and avoid being affect by its bad influences. We should try to let the new technologies service us, but not let it lead and master our lives. Only in this way, we can create our own campus literature culture and be sure it is much better than before.