summary on new literacy

In his recent work in a Wired Magazine’s article “Clive Thompson on New Literacy” Clive Thompson suggests that we are in midst of a literacy revolution and knowing who you are writing and what you are writing for is the main principle of a good writing. In this article he says how usually in the beginning of a school year we hear complaining that kids today can’t write because of technology. It encourages “narcissistic blabbering”, replaced carefully laid out essays and that texting short forms has defiled academic writing. But this project lead by a professor at Stanford University confirms the opposite. They collected over 14,000 samples of students’ writings of in class assignments, journal entries, essays, blog posts, and chat threads and the got some compelling results.
Fist thing they found was that this young generation writes far more than any other generation and that’s because so much socializing is done through computers and it requires writing. Thirty-eight percent of the writing samples were “life writing” or writing that took place outside of class. Thompson explains how his generation ( before the internet was available) most would never write anything that wasn’t school related. The team doing this project found that after the big bang in technology students learned really fast and well how to asses their audience and in what tone to get their message across. All the online writing is conversational and public making the students adapt to addressing different groups of audience in expert ways and gives them a “different sense of what constitutes good writing”. Writing has became more or less part of their daily lifestyle. Although Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that technology is the main reason for this literacy revolution and that technology can make anyone an expert in writing.
My own view is that technology does not make this young generation good writers. Though I concede that technology has helped the writers to expend their boundaries it did not make them experts in writing. Technology is a tool that can give them the ability to reach the different audiences and they do this regularly than this practice and experience makes them better in writing. Technology is a tool for those people that have a talent in writing to continue to grow. Before such opportunities were not available so the talented writers didn’t have much ways of showing or expressing their talent through. For example an artist that thinks in colors, feelings, pictures and only a few words would not be able to write really well constructed paper, but if you give the artist a canvas the artist will transfer those thoughts onto the canvas. Same goes for writers except that they probably have more colorful words jumping in their brains then a mixture of colors, pictures and sounds. The only difference is that they didn’t have the “canvas” to spill out their thoughts on. Of course they had journals and newspapers and papers to write on but technology gave them another type of canvas that now gives them the ability to expand their writing abilities like they couldn’t before.