Author: Jessica Wang Date: Sep 13 2021
My Technology Narrative
“Weekly Report Available: Your screen time was up to 7% last week, for an average of 10 hours, 27 minutes a day.” Every week, I receive a message from my MacBook, telling me that how many hours on average I spend on it, and it seems that I relied it heavily. Indeed, laptop, phone, and iPad are three items that I always carry around with me. Every morning, when I wake up, the first thing I am going to do is check my phone for messages and look through different social media applications. I carry my phone with me all time, texting my friends, posting pictures and sharing my emotions on WeChat and Instagram, and emailing my professors with questions and concerns. My laptop and iPad allow me to take notes in class and accomplish my assignments more productively. Digital devices and technology are indispensable parts of my life, assisting me in performing all sorts of tasks and expressing myself. Right now, as I sit in front of my laptop, I begin to think about how computers have gradually become part of my life, especially in reading, writing, and communicating.
My first time using a computer was at the age of ten. Recalling my childhood memory, I remember using a laptop to watch Japanese animation, which intrigued my later interest in anime and art. As I started high school, computers gradually became more significant for me. I attended an American boarding school in Minnesota, which is totally different from the Chinese school I attended. Unlike traditional Chinese high schools, where students are only allowed to use paper and pen to study, my new school required each student to bring a laptop or tablet to school. We operate on laptops to finish daily assignments and projects, watch asynchronous class videos, and communicate with teachers by email. In American high school, students are assigned more creative homework instead of tedious memorization and practice booklets filled with tons of Math problems. I believe technology is one of the factors causing this distinction. In my high school, we can utilize our laptops to research on the Internet and write a research paper on the Trail of Tears, post our views on Shakespeare’s play on an online platform, and create visually appealing presentation slides with convincing numerical data and chart about Apple Inc. I progressively start to utilize technology to communicate my ideas and express my feelings with my classmates and teachers. On the other hand, I am also able to learn others’ viewpoints on certain topics or events through different kinds of online discussion platform, thinking and analyzing things from another perspective. In this way, technology helps to strengthen my ability in critical thinking and creativity.
Computers can actually do more than communicating and expressing one’s opinion. I had this discovery when I began my undergraduate education at Emory University. Last semester, I took a freshman seminar course called Data Science for Beginners, which integrates linguistics and data science. In this course, we were introduced to a new terminology called Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subject that utilizes Linguistics, Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence to study human language and analyze text. I first learned that computers could perform the process of close reading and interpretation of the text by using complicated algorithms to break down sentences into small parts. We used a variety of NLP tools to analyze our assigned text corpus and extrapolate a more profound meaning of the text. The software is powerful and convenient enough to analyze the use of words in the text, sentence structure, grammatical characteristics by computing various visualizations. Through interpreting the output generated by the computer algorithm, I collaborated with my partner to accomplish a final paper that analyzed the rhetorical devices, change of tone, and main messages in Inaugural Addresses from the year 1789 to 2017. Without technology and wisely designed software, we are not able to perform a close reading on such a large scale of the text. Isn’t it striking and intriguing that computers can interpret text and analyze the linguistic characteristics?
Up to this point in my life, technology is a vehicle that assist me to travel through my educational pathway and overcoming different obstacles during my journey, especially in the aspects of writing, reading, and communication. By providing me with various resources, technology enables me to broaden my horizon, explore new subjects, communicate with others, and making self-expression, making my learning process more interesting and engaging.
“The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it, so it’s part of everyday life.”
Bill Gates
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