For about a solid year and a half now, I’ve been working with a computer that has a gash in its screen that takes up a prime portion of my screen (see the featured image for reference). At first, I only thought of it as me being careless with my possessions and having to deal with the consequences as a result, but I recently gave thought to how it might affect my literacy intake. One of the biggest things that I’ve noticed is that my reading and writing speed has decreased. At first, this may sound like a negative, but it does bring some positives. The main positive that I’ve noticed is that it makes me reread whatever I’m reading or typing more times than before. I do this because it’s just in my doubtful mind that I’ll misunderstand something due to the crack in the screen or I’ll make a typo if I don’t reread my sentences repeatedly that I’ve typed. However, there are definitely some major negatives that come with this computer screen crack. A major negative is that closed-captions are no longer helpful anymore. The text goes by too fast and I usually can’t figure out what’s being said under the cracked portion of the screen that quickly. Another major negative is overall annoyance, which sometimes creates impatience in my reading. I have to constantly moves the scroll bar up and down, left and right to see what’s under the cracked screen, and in all honesty, I’m sometimes too impatient to do such and guesstimate what the words under the crack likely are. Overall, I definitely don’t recommend keeping a computer with a cracked screen, but it was interesting nonetheless to see how it’s changed my literacy patterns.
