Sunday, January 10, 2010

Reading Response # 1: The Jury Is Still Out

Clive Thompson brings to light an issue that rests in the back of the most of people’s minds regarding social media. Is the explosion of technology and social networking damaging what we know as proper academic writing? Are the endless texts messages affecting a generation’s ability to read and write? As many professionals are arguing that Facebook and Twitter are monsters of academia, Clive Thompson enthusiastically defends social media. In his article “The New Literacy,” Thompson tackles the controversy surrounding today’s students and the concept that they are falling into an “age of illiteracy.” By presenting evidence from professor Andrea Lundsford’s Stanford Study of Writing, his case promotes that “technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it–and pushing our literacy in new directions.” While texting, Facebook and Twitter are dominating the amount of writing in a young person’s life; they are actually developing “a different sense of what constitutes good writing.” Let the evidence speak to the jury that when Andrea Lundsford studied written work of freshman at Stanford, there was not a single case of text slang. Thompson campaigns that “students today almost always write for an audience.” He is stressing that new technology provides students the ability to learn to use different types of writing for different types of audiences. Although Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that the social media revolution of young writers is saying more by saying less.

Like many other young Facebook users, I have always been curious about the effect social media is having on my generation. While still unsure where I stand on the matter, I can confidently emphasize that there are positive benefits when it comes to academic writing. The pros outweigh the cons in this debate. Due to the constant written communication via text messaging and Facebook, I have dramatically increased my writing and typing abilities without even recognizing it. Though I concede Clive Thompson’s report on a positive revolution, I still maintain that some of the classic ways of communication are diminishing. It is very rarely that I ever hear of someone reading the newspaper or writing a love letter anymore. For someone that used to save sports headlines as a kid, I was disturbed to learn that the Seattle P-I had completely switched to digital print. The next generations to come won’t even remember a newspaper at the rate of newspapers making the digital switch. My own view is that social networking stunts the development of in-person social skills. The amount of personal phone calls and face-to-face conversations is rapidly declining and I fear that it may be harmful to future generations. As I find myself struggling to focus on long pieces of writing, I can’t help but contemplate the possibility that the social media explosion might directly be connected to the rise of ADHD diagnoses over the past decade. While Clive Thompson stresses very intriguing arguments, I demand that more research must be completed before I take a strong stand on the effects of social media.

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