POST 9

In the article, "from pencils to pixels" our sweet Mr. Baron discusses the transformation of technology in our world, not just the technological changes for the utilization of writers but also changes made throughout history to help the betterment of mankind.  He brings up these changes to compare technology of today and to show that some people who believe technology is destroying what we love about writing may be wrong about that assumption because there has always been technological advancement.  In this section of the reading Baron states that Thoreau is not as against the advancement of technology as Henderson is trying to let us believe.

"And it is true that some well-known writers have rejected new-fangleness. Writing in the New York Times, Bill Henderson (1994) reminds us that in 1849 Henry David Thoreau disparaged the information superhighway of his day, a telegraph connection from Maine to Texas. As Thoreau put it, 'Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.' Henderson, who is a director of the Lead Pencil Club, a group opposed to computers and convinced that the old ways are better, further boasts that Thoreau wrote his anti-technology remarks with a pencil that he made himself. Apparently Samuel Morse, the developer of the telegraph, was lucky that the only letter bombs Thoreau made were literary ones.
In any case, Thoreau was not the complete Luddite that Henderson would have us believe. He was, in fact, an engineer, and he didn’t make pencils for the same reason he went to live at Walden Pond, to get back to basics. Rather, he designed them for a living. Instead of waxing nostalgic about the good old days of hand-made pencils, Thoreau sought to improve the process by developing a cutting-edge manufacturing technology of his own."
 (425)

 You see here that he is not against technology but actually condones it.  It is my belief that he is a man of many talents who knows of technologies evils, and its goodness too.