The Perils of Not Paying Attention
One can describe these perils as sort of a holding back of society. According to Selfe, if we do not embrace technology to an extent, or at least pay attention to it, it will result in us not being able to advance as a human society at all. A strange fear, but a legitimate one. Imagine if we considered the wheel some sort of heresy when invented it, that like the computer is to the book, it's degrading our society. Like say.. it takes away meaning from the good ol' fashioned walk that grants excersise. But without the wheel.. many of society today would be still in such a primitive extent. Ignoring technology and not being privy the advancements that surround us daily, is a dangerous move indeed. Now imagine this, imagine throughout your college days you've only ever used handwritten essays in your homework, and suddenly you're required to type up an essay, and you've never typed on a single keyboard in your life, remember how long it took for people to learn how to type in school? This is going to be one headache of an essay. See, society changes it's methods and social quirks through technology, that's how not paying attention to these advancements, can serve to be quite dangerous.
Politics.
Let's consider what it means to be literate. It means to be absolutely able to understand and read different articles of a grammatical and communicative nature. And how does politcs communicate? Through literacy. The problem is, all that information on how to better inform us politically are all internet based. That reveals the extensiveness that technology and literacy have become the core of politics.
Downsides of a 1999 article.
This article's obvious downside is probably the entire fact that it's outdated. Right now, we accept technologies like the I-Pad and the Nintendo 3DS as a part of complete daily life.. however, if you brought an I-Pad and showed to everyone in 1999, people would think you were showing them Alien technollogy (Watch out! He's got an I-Probe!!). Under these circumstances, we can assume that Selfe wasn't exactly sure what sort of turn Technology would take back in that era, she didn't know about the Kindle, the Android, or any of that stuff. She lived in an era where we still had the world's bulkiest desktops and the dinosaur of all videogames called the Game Boy. So in consideration, it is a distinct possibility, that our technology has taken a completely different direction then what what Selfe initially theorized
