Clive Thompson on the New Literacy summary

In his recent work, Clive Thompson explores the issue of whether technology today is causing an “age of illiteracy”. Technologies such as Facebook encourage narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into "bleak, bald, sad shorthand" (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). It has been argued that these technologies are diminishing our ability to write up to college standards and are sending us in the wrong direction. On one hand we have the opinion of this college professor saying technology is to blame for our illiteracy, but on the other side of it Thompson talks about a study conducted by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. She has organized a project called the Stanford Study of Writing to study the way college students write. For 5 years from 2001 to 2006 she collected 14,672 student writing samples. She collected a large variety of writings such as in-class assignments, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. After analyzing all of this she found that rather than being in an age of illiteracy, she found that we were in a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization. From her studies she found that students today are writing more out of class than ever before. In the past students rarely wrote outside of class unless required by their careers after schooling. Through her study she found that 38 percent of the students writing was done out of the class. Also the fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over what movie to go see that night. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor. It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. But is this necessarily good on a technical level? Lunsford's team found that the students were actually very good at using what rhetoricians call kairos, or the ability to assess their audience and adapt their tone and technique to best get their point across. Some experts would argue that this would cause texting short-forms and smileys to show up in academic writing. But when Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper. In my opinion this new way of writing is essentially evolving the way we write and communicate today. Just because it isn’t the traditional way does not necessarily mean it isn’t more effective. Today college students know how to address their audience better than ever before and adjust what their saying to communicate effectively. Isn’t that what writing is all about in the first place? I don’t believe there should be a set way of how we are required to write. Form and properness should not come before getting the message across and effectiveness. Although there are certain times when academic writing is appropriate and other times when texting lingo and such are appropriate as well, but we know how to identify these situations and act accordingly. We are revolutionizing literacy as we know it.