Baron's "From Pencils To Pixels"

I agree with Baron's claim that literacy technology is always evolving and that what seems really old to us now was once new and was also viewed with skepticism like it is today. The computer, he says, is just the newest invention in a long line of inventions that have helped us write.

Five sentences that support this position:
1. "The pencil may seem a simple device in contrast to the computer, but although it has fewer parts, it too is an advanced technology." - We think that pencils are so old fashioned since now we have complicated electronic devices that can do virtually everything for us, but at the time they were created, pencils were viewed just like we view high tech computers nowadays.
2. "We cannot be exactly sure why writing was invented, but just as the gurus of today's technology are called computer geeks, it's possible that the first writers also seemed like a bunch of oddballs to the early Sumerians, who might have called them cuneiform geeks." - Since speaking was the primary way of getting ideas across originally, the people who invented writing might have been looked at in a way that denoted above average intelligence. I know I look at technology experts in today's world that way.
3. "Plato was one leading thinker who spoke out strongly against writing, fearing that it would weaken our memories."
4. "When we began to use computers in university writing classes, instructors didn't tell students about the spell-check programs on their word processors, fearing the students would forget how to spell." - This sentence and the previous sentence represent the fact that people today have the same fears that people in the past had. Even though it may seem ridiculous to us now that people feared the act of writing because writing has been around for ages, writing was new at one time and people generally fear new things.
5. "We have a way of getting so used to writing technologies that we come to think of them as natural rather than technological. We assume that pencils are a natural way to write because they are old — or at least because we have come to think of them as being old." - Since writing and pencils and whatnot have been around for so long, we forget they are forms of technology. We only see computers as technology because that's what is new today, but old things were once new.

One sentence that's ambiguous:
Under the section Humanists and Technology, I just don't understand why Henderson is so anti-computers when pencils were the computers of the 1800s. He bases his actions on the fact that Thoreau didn't like telegraphs, but Thoreau full-well knew that pencils were technology since he designed them for a living.

Questions for class discussion:
Do you think this article would make people who are "anti-technology" give technology a chance, seeing as the tools they use and see as old-fashioned were once new?