How does the new technology affect our 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, as a new literary style, 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 forms,
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 technologies give
a good impaction on our campus literature? In my opinion, anything has its good
and bad sides, so we can’t only say it is good or bad. We must think about the
issue comprehensibly before we come to 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, are 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, because 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.
Though internet
brings us more time and chance to read, the content of what we read on the internet
become an issues following with it. 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.
Another ignore benefit
we can get from the internet is that 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.
On the other hand,
internet changes us writing habit. When we are writing on our blogs and
Facebook, we always try to edit the information again so that it can attract readers’
attention quickly. As a result, what we write on the internet becomes shorter.
Our writing has been played to the gallery. Furthermore, more of us won’t go to
library or read many books and magazines to collect information and data before
write, it let us lose many opportunities to learn things. Because the
information on the internet 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.
Another advantage
the Internet brings to us is that 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.
On the contrary, the
visualization of literature brings us 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.
Works Cited
Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making
Us Stupid?” The Atlantic July-Aug. 2008. The Atlantic. Web. 27 Jan 2012.
Sullivan, Andrew. "Why I
Blog." The Atlantic Nov. 2008. The Atlantic. Web. 27 Jan. 2012.
Thompson, Clive. “Clive Thompson
on the New Literacy”. Wired Magazine. 24 August 2009.
Once upon a time, the way we get news is simplex. At that
time, there was no network, no television, and most of us read newspaper or
listen to radio to get to know the world. The form and technology limited the
content. What the public can know is all recreated by the editors. Just like
Jarvis draws, the editors collect information and sent them to people; the
process is linear. This always leads a lot of problems especially in the
countries which the freedom of the press not be protected very well. The government
can control the news easily. But now the situation is totally different, there
are more ways for people can get information from, and thanks to the new technology,
word is not the only tools people can use to spread news. There are many kinds
of way they can use to collect data and show the result to the public. Press
becomes more plentiful and believable. Like Jarvis writes, the tradition press
now “is replaced today by a press-sphere in which any of many sources can,
thanks to links, add up a story and to fulfilling the need or desire for news
and information.” But I think the problem is too simple, and the she doesn’t explain
the meaning of the overlapping part. I think since she draws these parts, it
must contain some meaning. I think it would be a very interesting thing, but
how Jarvis draws makes me confused, I try to explain by myself, but I give up
in the end. Otherwise, her model expresses the basic situation clearly, after
read that I realize the change of press suddenly. It is true that the press
becomes a press sphere today. When I see a piece of news, I want to see the photos
and videos of it, and the links of the news to other sources become an
indispensable part when I read it. Besides I would use Facebook, Blogs to see
more relative information about it. 
