Unit 1 Draft
From Pencils To Pixels
by Dennis Baron brought up some interesting topics that are rarely ever
thought about in a normal day. He discusses the Innovation and progression
behind many modern tools and practices. An intriguing point Baron made in this
piece was the identification of pencils as a complex technology. It was no
simple process getting the Pencil to where it is today. There was a lot of work
that needed to go into the physical production of the pencil and it had to go
through multiple changes before it became the pencil we know today. At first,
just like any other new unused technology or invention, the pencil had some
trouble getting accepted. The examples with both the calculator and spell count
were also crucial to his main argument. When they came out, there was tons of
criticism surrounding the new technologies but in time they got accepted as a
necessity. Teachers thought calculators would restrict kids from learning to do
math but now in any math related classroom or job a calculator is crucial.
Baron analyzed cases that I hadn’t really considered in the past and I am glad
I read this piece to get a better understanding of the argument. It really
allowed the reader to get a better appreciation of the tools we have accessible
today, but also what we have had in the past.
The second source I used is a New York Post article written
by Mike Wehner called Researchers trained
robots to write poetry. The article explores Artificial Intelligence and
the ability of Robots to perform Human tasks. Researchers in Australia
developed an algorithm capable of writing poetry, and the results are pretty
amazing. The robot was fed “nearly 3,000 sonnets as training, and the
algorithm tore them apart to teach itself how the words worked with each
other. “(https://nypost.com/2018/08/08/researchers-trained-robots-to-write-poetry/). After analyzing and piecing together all the
information, the robot was able to create some poems on its own. Most of the
created poems were very well put together and sounded as if they had come from
a human writer. In fact, when the bot’s verses were mixed with human-written
poems participants were split 50-50 over who wrote them.[1] This article really shed light on how
intelligent artificial intelligence is becoming. Something like poetry would be
one of the last places where I’d expect robots to interfere, but it seems as if
that’s becoming a reality. The author’s project was no more than sharing these
discoveries with the audience but he does it in a well-orchestrated manner. He
gets the reader interested by discussing the significant strides that AI has
taken and transitions that into the discussion of robot poetry. This article
perfectly fits into the conversation of writing and technology because
technology is now beginning to create writing which is already a technology in
itself.
http://mediatedcultures.net/presentations/from-knowledgeable-to-knowledge-able/
The third source I chose was the Ted talk we watched in
class “From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able” given by Michael Wesch. I found it
very intriguing how Wesch organized his speech as he did it in a fashion that
really sucked in the viewer. The genre of this piece is really just a TED talk
where he is trying to get a point across and to advocate change. He started his
talk off by relating today’s society to an Aztec story of the entire world
being on fire, mentioning that we are in a time of social unrest, economic
crises, and that we cannot continue to live the way that we have been living.
He then dove into the discussion of technology and media. When the television
was initially introduced it entirely changed how we went about our lives as
humans. Our conversations were “controlled by the few and designed for the
masses” (Wesch), we had no voice as a population. Today however, new media has
entirely changed this whole concept, it is no longer a one way conversation.
Through multiple examples Wesch shows that we now have more of a voice than
ever and we can create change through this new media platform. He says we need
to go beyond just teaching critical thinking in the classrooms as we need to
adapt to and accept that media is the future. Overall, it should be noted that
Technology taking over can be incredibly beneficial for society if we change
our ways and use media to contribute and impact todays world.
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