We Are How We Read

Prior to reading Carr’s article on technology and the way that it has transformed society, I had always thought of it in a positive light. Technology was essentially designed to make our lives easier, to make things more accessible, and more efficient.  After reading his article however, I began to re-think technology and how it affected myself. In the beginning, Carr stated that the Internet was “chipping away at his concentration and contemplation,” and how using it so much had almost essentially trained his brain to take in information “in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” I thought it was an interesting metaphor that he used, once being a scuba diver and now zipping along the surface on a jet ski. I think this is true for myself as well, because whenever I read a lengthy text, my brain automatically skims through the text, sometimes not completely even grasping the entire concept – only certain key words. Maryanne Wolf’s statement, “we are not what we read, “ rather “we are how we read,” was also interesting because I never thought of reading in that sense. I always thought that people generally measured a person’s intelligence by the content of what they chose to fill their minds with, yet Wolf brings up a completely different argument that reading online weakens our capacity for deep reading.  

            After reading Ulmer’s introduction to this 21^st century idea of “electracy,” I thought it was interesting on how he defines the term as “Electracy is to digital media what literacy is to the alphabetic writing,” and the notion of how it is an apparatus or platform. The definition was slightly vague but I took it to mean that electracy could be a variety of things such as a computer, television, radio, or rather any type of technology that is able to circulate mass media to large audience. He also stated that its not just technological but is also institutional. The word institution generally refers to a building or an organisation, but it could also take to mean a "well-established and structured pattern of behaviour" in a sociological context, according to the dictionary. My interpretation of this was that perhaps electracy is a lifestyle that we are heading towards and something that we are relying on in our every day lives. As a philosophy major, I was interested when Ulmer tied theories of 19^th century philosophers to the current and modern idea of electracy. He states that philosophers “did not invent the equipment of writing,” but rather “invented the materialist metaphysics.” I think this statement could be interpreted in a number of ways, but personally I took it to mean that philosophers didn’t necessarily come up with tools for writing, but they came up with their set of beliefs on what is real and true, and transformed these thoughts into words. Just as they turned those thoughts into words, we in the 21^st century have turned our words or literacy into electracy, meaning that we have put them onto social machines such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and such.

Discussion Questions:

1. What does Maryanne Wolf mean by "We are not what we read, we are how we read?" My interpretation is that she means its not the context that we're spending our time on, yet its how much we pay attention on and our attempt at grasping the concepts of which we are reading.

2. What do you think Ulmer meant in his definition of electracy being "partly technological, partly institutional?" My interpretation of this was that perhaps electracy is a lifestyle that we are heading towards and something that we are relying on in our every day lives.