The Information of Indexes

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Recommended: How technology affects literature

The Information of Indexes

Throughout centuries writing technologies have consistently altered the processes of reading and writing. With each new technological advance, mankind has continually adapted to the necessary reading and writing skills pertaining to such innovations. The advance from handwriting to print dramatically changed the processes of reading and writing, but now we face a new era of technology: as the world of cyber culture continues to develop. For college students, these progressions of literary technologies have drastically changed the way we think about reading and writing.

Much of a college student’s life is spent researching and obtaining data. In the past, this meant that most students would have to spend endless hours searching and reading through texts in libraries in order to find the proper material to use for research support. Today, on-line college library indexes and databases give students the opportunity to instantaneously find thousands of supporting texts in only a matter of minutes—all the while in the comfort of their own homes.

Eastern Michigan’s on-line library databases offer vast amounts of articles, essays and academic journals ranging from African American Literature to Zoology. The forefront of this convenient technology has drastically changed students’ reading and writing habits and methods of research projects. Sven Birkerts, a literary critic, comments on this new shift of literary techniques in an article titled “Into the electronic Millennium”.

The printed word is part of a vestigial order that we are now moving away from—by choice and by societal compulsion. I’m not just talking about disaffected academics either. This shift is happening throughout o...

... middle of paper ...

...e process of reading and writing easier and more efficient.

Works Cited:

Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.”

Tribble and Trubek 35-53

Birkerts, Sven. “Into the electronic Millennium” Tribble and Trubek 62-74

Brown, John & Duguid, Paul. “The Social Life of Documents” Tribble and Trubek 104-123

Hirsch, E.D. “You Can Always Look It Up…or Can You?” Tribble and Trubek 183-191

Johnson, Steven “Links” Tribble and Trubek 195-213

Landow, George. “Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How Are We Moving Beyond the

Book?” Tribble and Trubek 214-226

Sosnoski, James. “Hyper readers and their Reading Engines” Tribble and Trubek 400-419

Tribble, Evelyn, and Trubek, Anne, eds. Writing Material: Readings from Plato to the Digital Age.

Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2003

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