Imagine that one day you woke
up and your computer was gone or there was no paper in your house. What
would you use to communicate to people that you knew far away? There
are so many different ways to communicate to one another nowadays that we
take for granted. If someone was to take away these ways to communicate
to one another what would this world do? It is amazing that when these
modern writing tools are gone we find ourselves lost and unable to express
ourselves. As a society, we take so many things for granted that are
truly important in our everyday lives. Ways of writing something down
that have become so common could one day not be there.
For this assignment I was asked to "create" my own writing
technology without using any of the modern conviences to help me to achieve
this goal. I started to thinking of all the things found in nature
that I could use as a good way to communicate some form of language to other
people around me. What could I possibly use to make letters to spell
words that make sentences to communicate to others without using verbal language?
As I began brainstroming in my head without using a pencil and
paper to help me jot down ideas that came into my head, there my technology
was all along sitting right outside my bedroom window. The new way
to communicate without using the modern technologies that we use today is
to use pine needles.
Now I am not going to use the pine needles that are
still on the trees, but the pine needles that have fallen off and are just
sitting there on the ground doing absolutely nothing. I took these helpless
pine needles and arranged them together to form the equivalent of the English
alphabet. Sticking with the same alphabet it will elminate the problems
of having to learn a completely new way to communicate with one another.
This is how I would begin, I would gather the pine needles that would
be needed to create a sentence. I would then arrange these pine needles
into letters so that I can place these letters together to make sentences.
In the end someone would be able to look at the ground and see the
arranged pine needles into letters and be able to understand the point that
I was trying to get acroos.
Although this seemed like such a great idea at the beginning,
I did not think of the disadvantages of using pine needles until it was
time to write this paper. One of these disadvantages is that I only
want to use the pine needles that have fallen off of the trees. This
would allow the trees to still live and produce more pine needles so that
I could use to communicate to other people. Another and bigger
disadvantage that was brought to my attention is the time consumption that
would go into creating this text. Each pine needles would need to
be placed together to form each letter in the alphabet. I would have
to gather all of the pine needles and then arrange the pine needles so that
they make letters and those letters make words so that someone could understand
what I was trying to get across to another person. The last and most
important concern that I have is that not everyone has a pine tree just sitting
outside their bedroom window. How would anyone be able to communicate
anything if you do not have the materials? I am sure that not everyone
could go out and buy a pine tree to plant in their backyard. Therefore,
the inconvenience of the pine needles plays a major role in why my "created"
text would probably not survive very long.
Some of the advantages of using pine needles as a writing
tool is, there is not the need for any other tools to create pine needles.
I would not be harming any living thing in nature to use the pine
needles because I am only going to use the dead, fallen off needles. I
am going to have to gather as many needles as possible in the fall because
that is really the only time that the pine needles fall off of the trees.
People should want to plant more pine trees so that the communication
continues to grow. We can always use more trees in the environment
to make it easier to breathe. In the end, the disadvantages out weigh
the advantages a great deal. As a result, my "created" writing technology,
using pine needles placed together to make words to communicate, would not
be very successful in modern society today.
In conclusion, alhthough I had an extremely hard time
finding something found in nature to create a text so people would be able
to use it to communicate, I think that it gave me an understanding fo how
important even a piece of paper and pencil are. If these modern technologies
were gone one day I think that many people would be extremely lost. As
a society, we need to start to be thankful for what we have around us and
not take it for granted.
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TRADTIONAL ESSAY
"Creating" a Writing Technonlogy
