Clive Thompson

In the article “The New Literacy,” by Clive Thompson,” I developed an understanding towards his perspective on recent cultural literacy and new technologies.  Thompson claims that many pundits and writing professors are arguing that recent technological advances like power points, face book and blogging are “dumbing down” our community and making us illiterate.  Popular technologies such as messaging phones are causing and epidemic as it continues to “dehydrate language into bleak, bald, sad short hand”.(Pg 1)  In other words are writing skills are now at par to chicken stretch.  Although very different than Thompson’s argument, I believe recent technology is increasing society’s abilities to write.  Andrea Lunsford is also on a similar page as me.  She Implicates a forceful statement, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,”(Pg 1)  she moves on to comment, “…technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it.” (Pg. 1) The impression I receive from Lunsford’s quote is very positive and that are intelligence is brightening.   

 I’m utterly confused when the argument is made that “an age of illiteracy is at hand.” (Pg 1) Adults and children are writing more than ever, and this is due to “…much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.” (Pg. 2)  The complaint has been made by teachers all over America, they wish kids would just stop texting, or log off face book when their focus should be towards school.  Many people assume that these resources are a major distraction, but their also improving our ability to write.  In a college survey done by Stanford University a stunning 38 percent of writing took place outside of the class room.  Before the Internet was a popular feature of our everyday life, Americans never wrote anything unless it was a school assignment a job requiring writing. 

In research, “Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos- assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get there point across.”  (Pg. 1)  Lunsford concludes that we have achieved higher remarks on getting a proper tone across.  Our generation prefers writing to an audience and that is why activities such as instant messaging, blogging, texting and face book are so fashionable. According to her, “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.” (Pg. 1) The essence of Lunsford’s comment is that when you post a twitter comment or update your face book status an audience around 100-1000 people may skim across it.  Of those many friends, a few may click a simple “like”, or even post a friendly hello or even silly remark.  Feed back like that is simply much more fun and enjoyable compared to a boring letter grade.  Though all of Lunsford’s examination “she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.” (Pg. 1) In other words Lunsford brings forward the idea that academic writing and life writing may highly vary in style, they don’t interfere nor complicate each other. 

All this online media and recent changes to the Internet are fulfilling our intellectual outlook as we strive to increase our writing ability.  Lunsford agrees when she states, “The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.” (Pg. 2) What she is saying is we are expressing ourselves in a new and efficient way.”  Although not everyone will agree, these changes in society are only starting to reflect our intellectual growth.