"New Literacy" Summary

In a recent essay written by Clive Thompson, his recent work entitled “New Literacy” he is saying that the world around us has changed its writing style. University College London English Professor John Sutherland said that “Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” Considering that John believes that the writing style of 2010 has become primitive. However, another study made by Stanford University Professor Andrea Lunsford believes that the studies made by Sutherland may be far fetched. In the time span between “2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 writing samples.” Her research showed and I quote “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek Civilization.” According to Lunsford, technology seems to be creating a new form of writing from its sources of entertainment such as Facebook and Twitter. Lunsford’s research showed that young people today write far more than any generation preceding ours, this is due to the new social networks that involve text and writing. In his essay, he writes, “before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they get a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.” This was during a time where writing was apparently tedious, whereas today it doesn’t seem as hard work or “painful.” Thompson’s report also talks about students being adept to what rhetoricians call Kairos, which is “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” He leaves the readers of this report with a saying “ What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.” Today, people are more concerned about how their writings affect the people they are trying to reach out to; like their friends, family, colleagues, etc. In my opinion, what his writing was based on was that how our acedemic world towards the newer generation is and has greatly changed due to blogging, Facebook, texting, etc. Thompson believes that this is a new writing revolution where people are writing to an active audience where it creates more social events. For the most part, I agree completely about the fact that today’s society is changing due to the undeniable power of the Internet. Although I must also agree partly to Sutherlands opinion where that speech and grammar seem to be lacking and replaced by the infamous lol, omg and of course the smilieys (i.e :) >.< ,:P, etc. ) This issue is important because it is showing the sudden and yet gradual change from what look like more sincere and formal writings such as “Dear Mr. X” and “To whom it may concern” and being turned into three letter acronyms that mean more than they actually look like at first.

Alex Crockett