Technology On Writing And Reading

J Wright
J Wright
Nov 3 · 2 min read

For a (seemingly) growing number of people, technology is doing away with writing and reading. To these people, technology will eventually make writing obsolete. With the increase of visual media, reading will become obsolete as well. And with the increasing abilities of A.I. (with some being able to write generated stories now), it does throw how useful writing is into question.

However, the way I see it, technology has made reading and writing that much more important. We live in a society that requires some sort of reading at all times (i.e. reading this blog post, the news, the sports, science findings). It is nigh impossible to go any time at all without reading something. Without the advent of technology, that would have never happened.

Before literary works were available to the layman, only a select few were capable of reading. But with the invention of modern technology, more and more people can read — in fact, it’s expected to be able to read in today’s society.

As with writing, technology has also helped make that more widespread as well. Whether you are writing an email for work, jotting down your thoughts for the fun of it, taking notes, or texting someone, you are almost always writing in one form or another.

(In today’s world, I don’t really differentiate “writing” as actually taking pen to paper. The process of getting words down is “writing,” in my book, even if it’s texting or typing.)

In my mind, even though more people think writing and reading well are dying skills, I think having good reading/writing skills is more important than ever. After all, it is nearly impossible for us to communicate solely verbally now; we need some sort of written medium to communicate to an ever growing number of people.*

And without the ability to read correctly or the ability to write clearly, you are naturally at a disadvantage in today’s society.

*(I will add this footnote just in case: I am taking the perspective of someone that has the ability to read/write. I realize that not everyone is born with/has that ability [blindness, loss of limbs, loss of mental health, etc.]. Obviously, if one doesn’t have the ability, it cannot be assumed that they should have those abilities as well.)

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