Deborah Brandt Sponsors Of Literacy

It is virtually impossible to go throughout a day without encountering and using a form of digital electronics. It has always been prevalent to the human race, whether it’s from making tasks seem easier or for personal entertainment purposes. Although, technology helps us live our everyday lives, some people may argue that it depersonalizes the way we all live. The introduction of digital electronics was meant to enhance leisure and simplify the conventional daily tasks. Due to the countless benefits the advancement yields to society, people began to develop a dependency upon the materialistic things such as cell phones and computers to allow them to become a more literate individual (McClellan n.p.). Cell phones, computers, and other digital

Since the development of cell phones and computers, an increasing number of the population have found new methods to learn. In Deborah Brandt’s article “Sponsors of Literacy,” she conducted interviews with ordinary Americans, specially meeting with a “diverse group of people born roughly between 1900 and 1980,” and discovering their memories of how they learned to read and write. Most people recalled that they learned from “people, institutions, materials and motivations,” (Digital). Brandt labeled those elements, as sponsors of literacy. A sponsor of literacy is “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate suppress, or withhold literacy, and gain advantage by it in some way (Brandt). Before cell phones and computers, people learned through traditional approaches, such as listening to their educators in classrooms or reading books in their free time; however, now people manipulate electronic devices through unique

Kids today are exposed to all categories of electronic devices. A plethora of articles concerning how people’s literacy is affected by electronic gadgets can be revealed by using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). Some research suggests that cell phones and laptops ultimately bear a negative impact on the youth. An article written by Sharde Scott demonstrates how possessing a cell phone influenced her spelling. On Scott’s twelfth birthday, she received a cell phone from her grandmother. According to her article, she spent the majority of her time on her phone after she had gotten it. She quickly conquered the skill to text and call, but she had difficulty trying to set up a voicemail (Scott). After frustrating for an hour, she finally completed her objective. She can now do everything her phone has the capacity to do. Scott would stay up at night and text her friends, however, she and her friends predominantly texted using short phrases and acronyms rather than actually typing the entire sentence (Scott). Cell phones had an immense impact on Scott and her friends when it comes to the way they write. “Technology is destroying my writing skills,” Scott declared. Websites such as Twitter and Facebook urge a variety of people to type posts that are grammatically incorrect because they anticipate that the spell check