Without a doubt, technology as a whole has pushed us to new heights. Medicine, computers, military systems to name a few out standers. These have come such a long way even since the middle of the 20^th century, pushing their uses to the limit and always adjusting to fit our needs and wants each day. With the abilities and, some may even call it, powers, that technologies allow us, it can sometimes lead us to physically avoided the original way of communication. Sherry Turkel, the author of The Empathy Diaries, dives into the use of technology and how it has changed both us as humans, and the interaction we have with it. The argument she studies is that technology has taken away from the physical world of interactions and puts the creativity of communication to the back burner. Turkle’s book is in constant reverence of high-level communication and is doing so with a pushing and pulling motion of the way we let the latest and greatest dictate our interactions. For unknown reasons, the shaping of young minds has shifted into an almost distraction process, and technology has become the leading challenger when it comes to having these kids fully invested into something that isn’t tangible.

In the other direction, mostly blank stares at a projector screen, tired eyes, and the frantic clicking of keyboards trying to compress an entire chapter’s worth of short-handed notes into a couple pages of blocked and numbered information points. One-way is crowded and traffic jam-like, the other is easy cruising by going 55 in the middle lane. It should be an appreciated attempt that most professors take when it comes to teaching on a topic and their time being eating away, trying to bring students into the world that they have been involved in for most of their lives, especially in the STEM fields. The opening to “They say, I say” by Graff and Birkenstein is an interesting case. As someone who has written quite a few research papers, albeit some may have been sort of last second or just put to the backburner and we’ll figure out as we go, it’s probably safe to say now that I don’t think I ever really understood the physical structure that goes into a paper. Yes, I know we need an introduction, main topic paragraphs, then a summary at the end, but to actually break it down into smaller chunks and look at the anatomy of forming sentences then into paragraphs then into a full paper, that actually makes sense and is applicable to other things and not just the paper in front of me.