Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities.
I’m not entirely sure how to excerpt this post which is, itself, primarily composed of excerpts. However, what I can say is that you should read it as it contains important things to ponder about orality and literacy.
I think I came across it courtesy of some links shared in the chat/etherpad of a group of us who have kept meeting after collaborating on an AI and the Future of Education UNESCO-related thing earlier this year.
Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities. Xu Wenkan, with whom we are well acquainted on Language Log (see special bibliography below), refused to learn how to process sinographs in computers, and he was less liable to character amnesia than any Chinese person I know. I myself do not wish to learn how to “text”. Most astonishing of all, many of my super smart students are writing better by hand this year than their predecessors did in the past few decades. I behold their papers and essays and am breathless at the elegance of their handwritten compositions. I know not what to attribute this felicitous development to.
Another of my closest scholarly friends, Tsu-Lin Mei, resisted computers. Instead, he wrote out his papers on an old mechanical typewriter using Eaton’s Corrasable Bond. Sure, it smudged, but Tsu-Lin was happily and intimately in control of his composition.
Source: Language Log
Image: Jeff Hopper