Pencils.

The gate way to literacy is what people use to help them write and comprehend the things they read and write. Writing is a technology because its how we share our knowledge and ideas with others, and past it on to the next generation. Yes, a pencil is a piece of technology because it is also a way people can share and pass on knowledge and ideas with others. Plato dislikes the written word because he thought it would weaken our memories. Writing allows us to communicate in ways that speech doesn't allow, but it lacks tonal cues that speaking has. Thoreau connects to pencil technology because he was a pencil designer who sought to improve the process by developing a cutting-edge manufacturing technology. The telephone helped shape communication technology because it showed us the pattern of it. The telephone also combined both speaking and writing situations. Baron's conclusion is trying to say that every piece of technology that has came to life was once not excepted or considered bad, but after they have eventually been excepted they changed the way we do things. This article defines literacy as having sufficient control technology to be able to use it to help them read and write in new ways.

Writing in the 21st century.

The three challenges/opportunities of writing in the 21st are developing new models of composing, designing a new curriculum supporting those models, and creating new pedagogies enacting that curriculum. Yancey explain writing as a technology that exists "in spite of" cultures that devalued wirting and of prohibitions against it. No matter what suppressed us we found a way to write. The kinds of challenges that writing has faced in history is the suppression of females and people of color. Yancey's main argument is that composing is a social practice and that we need to help students become citizen composers instead of good test takers. Writing hasn't gotten as much cultural respect as reading because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control. Reading produces the feeling of intimacy and warmth. Some negative associations people make with writing is that it reminds them of pain or isolation.
Process writing is the process or invention, drafting, peer review, reflection, revising and rewriting, and publishing. Self-sponsered writing is a writing that belongs to the writer, not to an institution. This article "Writing in the 21st Century" defines literacy as the ability to compose on through social media, e-mail, or other electronic ways, and also knowing who your audience is and taking action. 

The Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

The main argument of the text "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" is about how social media websites like Facebook can allow us to carry on more relationships with people. It can also help us increase our "Dunbar number". The ties that social media can make are in between weak and strong ties. Mark Zuckerberg introduced the news feed to modernize Facebook, so that people could easily see the changes in their friend’s page. Adding a news feed cuts down the amount of time a person would waste examining each friend's page, checking if anything had changed or been updated. Before the news feed users had the ability to spend more time searching for information of Facebook, after the news feed it gave the user no reason to spend extra time looking for information, it was just there. The article refers to "ambient awareness" as very similar to being able to pick up on someone’s moods through body language. "Ambient awareness" can cause us to communicate with people in real life because you feel like you know everything that’s going on from social media. According to Thompson people in their 20's feel pressured to stay connected on Facebook because the majority of their age group is on their and they have to monitor what people tag them in and say about them. This article defines literacy as the ability to use social media in the right ways.