"From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies" by Dennis Baron

This quaint history of writing by Dennis Baron was quite dry in parts, but was effective in outlining the main events in the development of writing. After reading the chapter in Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel about the history of writing, I was already somewhat informed on its roots in Sumerian Cuneiform and so on, but what I especially took from Baron's article was his description on how people have accepted different writing technologies as they have come to be over the years.

Dennis talks about how every time there is a technology invented in the advancement of writing, it is not widely accepted at first and may not even be taken seriously. For example, when writing was first developed on stone tablets that were inscribed using styluses, because the majority of people were illiterate they took the scribes as being a joke much as people took the computer geeks of the nineties (when this article was most likely written). Another example would include Plato's criticism of writing when it was developed during ancient times, because he believed that written events weakened the actual memories of said events.

Besides showing how many people rejected the new technologies, Baron described how people over the ages reacted to the new technologies. First he told the story of how pencil makers initial rejected Morse code and the basis that they did not see it being effective. In turn, the developer of Morse code rejected the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell on the basis that he did not see it being effective because one could not record the conversations (in the initially invention).

The final point that I took out of Baron's article was that of differing reactions to the technologies of the pencil, the typewriter and the computer. First, the pencil grew in wide use by the fact the the only alternative was the pen and bottle of ink, so the pencil was a portable technology that could be easily taken anywhere. Also, with the invention of the typewriter and eventually the computer, the QWERTY keyboard system was developed in order to slow down typing speed so that the given machines would not break. This odd system of keyboard has stuck to this day due to widespread popularity.