The New Change in my life.

Cristian Moralez

English 1302

Dr Dimmick

Technology Literacy

Today, looking back at my life I believe technology has not only changed my generation’s culture, but also provided an enormous change in my literacy. In my experience with technology, the difference between now and back then has to deal with the different digital platforms that somehow have shaped its literacy practices into mine. Years have passed and now I believe technology and their social media websites like Myspace and Facebook have negatively shaped my literacy skills although they have made my jobs easier.

From the first time I used literacy in technology at fifth grade, to the first time when I typed up my first essay on “How important was it to be in school.” A desktop computer was the first technology and Microsoft Word was the first program I ever used which inaugurated my beginnings towards digital literacy. Microsoft word changed my traditional pen and paper that I, as a student, loved. Personally, pen and paper was more enjoyable because I felt more in touch with my writing. Then again, technology has actually saved me a bunch of money from buying those materials.

In my early education, technology and literacy mixed and took action in my English class because my teacher wanted us to get use to typing essays for class, but first of course, we needed to do a rough draft in paper up until this time. At that age, typing was an awesome experience because you actually found out a new way to write and print stories. Ultimately, the downfall of this memory was that my grammar and spelling at that time was developing as I was using dictionaries and thesaurus to expand my knowledge and self-reliance on doing all the research myself. This later started to change as the social media website Myspace was brought to my attention. At only 8 years of age, Myspace was introduced to me by a friend in school who said only the cool kids were the ones who had Myspace. Afterwards, like any other little kid trying to fit in, led me to create a Myspace. What I was attracted in Myspace was that it was a liberal practice of writing. What I mean about liberal practice is that Myspace allowed users like me to use incorrect spelling and sentence structures in our profiles without getting penalized or sanctioned with a bad grade. The aspect of freedom of expression was where I think I started to like about not having to write improperly and therefore I started to enjoy going to Myspace. As a result, the more I used Myspace, the more I was shaping my literacy to compromise negatively.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take even a month before I was already introduced to all the slang words and cool picture layouts. I did not only change my Myspace layout constantly; I also changed the proper form of writing to slang. The reason why I changed my writing to slang writing was because I wanted to sound cool and unique in my profile. So what is Slang writing? For example, writing “Was up Bro” replaced the words “How is it going” or “That’s poppin” meant “That’s great”. Not only were my words changing day by day, but my reading habits and my ignorance in correct spelling also increased. This was all do to Myspace, that allowed me to keep on writing and develop such literacy. Another example of a negative habit I started to shape within my literacy, was the use of unnecessary capitalization and exclamation points. In many occasions, I never started off a sentence by capitalizing the first letter, but rather capitalize it for other words which wouldn’t need it. For example, if would ask my friend, do you want to go the park? The way I would start off is with a lower case “D”, and then I would capitalize all of the rest of the sentence.

Although the Myspace era is over now, similar social media websites like Facebook were trending and with them Technological advancements like cellphones became a must have to me. Cellphones were the new way of communicating and surfing the internet faster than any other device. My first cellphone was a Boost Mobile phone, and although it helped me out on a faster way, it as well had the same liberal practice of literacy, which has not lead me to become well-shaped in literacy. From the use of cellphones, I got to have unlimited resources than I ever imagined, but some of these resources held me down from progressing. For example, with cellphones I stopped taking notes in classes because I would record my lectures, which doing so, made it easier for me but also really made me an irresponsible student because I would rely mostly on hearing the recorded lecture rather than paying attention in class. Secondly, with the use of phones, it broke down my focus on reading and practicing extended writings. What I mean by this is that, because of the small amount of text that many media content had within their websites, it made me as reader, read less as well. These practices, resulted in my loss of interest to read long passages of information. My attention grasp shorten as the text were longer and this was something that up until now, has stayed with me. Yes, it’s true, I hate reading any sort of long text and I am sure to blame my digital experiences.

One year later after my interest in Myspace stopped, social media website Facebook was a new media trend. Introduced to me by my sister and friends, Facebook generated a variety of different elements to help it become a different age group website. Facebook in my opinion was just the newer version of Myspace because its similar elements, of adding friends, social chat and cool interesting profile layouts, still consisted among this different social media. Facebook also became my preferred way of messaging friends from miles away, reading the news, and flirting. But just like Myspace, Facebook had shaped my literacy practice negatively.

Similar to Myspace, Facebook allowed me to still make my activeness on reading, lack immensely. For example, while scrolling down my home page I could have probably found interesting news which would have been a great story to read, but if I was going to click on it and saw over 2 paragraphs of text, my main suggestion would be to skip on and find another page which could relate to that idea in shorter terms. With that being said, Fox 26 and their news page, provided me with them short detailed information of news within my city. Yes, social media grew enormously to the point where news channels also applied their work on Facebook because its popularity. On a daily basis, I read their updates so I can get informed of any news in the Houston area. Unfortunately, this way of reading has also affected me because I had by this time in life, gotten into the habit to only skim through the subtitle and such a short time of attention which sometimes left me out the complete information. Yes, I have only gotten ignorant in reading thanks to the short text length I got to accustom to read. A second custom, I gained within my literacy, is to not to read books anymore. As a result of social media, I started to lack on my reading practices because at 10, books were no fun to me anymore. My new fun of course had change to Facebook because its addictive chats and discussions held me from practicing reading.

In conclusion, the accustoms today look similar when I was 10 years old. My ignorance to read has compromised my literacy skills. Perfect examples were my previous experiences. But most importantly, by being allowed to use unacceptable language and pronunciation in social media, the outcome has lead me today to still not properly master my grammar, pronunciation or helped me become a better writer.