Blog post 11

Throughout the course we read a bunch of interesting articles, but the ones that I found most interesting were the ones by Ong, specifically how "Writing Restructures Consciousness". It's strange for us to think about writing as a technological advancement and the cognitive side effects that came about because of it. I also found it interesting how Ong described the evolution of the alphabet, as well as other scripts and writing systems. Even though I'm a linguistics major, a lot of this information, the writing systems and the timeline from oral to literate cultures was completely new to me and furthered my knowledge of historical linguistics.

I wasn't really able to use it in any other blogs except the one where we were specifically asked to make the connections. If I were given infinite time and resources, I would try to extend Ong's article to the digital age. I believe that just as writing did before, now hypermediation in the form of websites, video games, and other digital forms (save for the traditional) are restructuring our consciousness. This would be quite the undertaking because it would involve surveys and cognitive ability tests of different age groups and different computer habits. As for the final project, I don't know if I'll be able to work it into my final project. I would have loved to have done the theory I stated above, but when I tried to research it, I didn't find much information to help support that claim.