matt's times : reading response #1

In a recent article “The New Literacy”, written by Clive Thompson, Thompson argues how technology is not only helping students and other people who write to be more creative in their writing, but it is also helping them to write better and more thought out papers, letters, or even notes. Thompson’s ideas contradict those of London English Proffessor John Sutherland, who argues that “kids today cant write- and technology is to blame” he writes that “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, Powerpoint has replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, shorthand””
Throughout Clive Thompson’s research paper the writer employs the use of a study as source to back up his ideals. This study conducted by Stanford University professor of writing and rhetoric, Andrea Lunsford. Betwixt the years of 2001 and 2006 Lunsford collected over fourteen thousand six hundred seventy-two pieces of writing which she organized into an immense project referred to as the Stanford Study of Writing. These pieces of writing were a plethora of “nationalities”, there were e-mails, blog posts, journal entries, formal essays, and in-class assignments. What was first understood was that students were writing more pieces and writing them longer. Astounding Lunsford was that thirty-eight percent of the writing took place outside the classroom, and the majority of that happened online. At the end of Lunsfords project an astounding discovery was made, technology is not harming the ability for academic writings these days but rather progressing it.
Implications written by Thompson throughout his article are that technology is not bettering academic writing these days, whereas in reality it is just on average that technology betters academic writing. What is more is that Thompson is yielding all credit to the fact that it is technology that is progressing academic writing, when in reality it could be any thing: examples could be that people are more social these days or current events. What I am saying is how you can target these advances in writing as technology rather than current events. I am not saying that Technology is not the reason because it obviously is a large contributing factor, but how can you pinpoint the main factor behind this “new age” academic writing?
When I read “The New Literacy” some thoughts I had were that I believed what was written as true. I think that technology is helping writers to better express themselves whether it is through e-mail or texts or even Facebook, and that when you express yourself more then your writings will be more creative. What else I thought when I read Thompson’s article was that even though it says the writing and creativity was getting better it does not proclaim that spelling or grammar was getting better. I think that technology in this circumstance is ruining our ability to write; when “texters” text or “facebookers” facebook I find that they tend to shorten their writings, misspell words or write in “texting” form. I am not saying, however, that this is overall true or even that I am right but that is just the way I see this “New Literacy”