In Friday’s entry, I was fretting about the passage of Reading Rainbow and the consequences on kids’ reading habits. I felt a little better after reading Clive Thompson’s article in Wired entitled “The New Literacy“, which examines how the Internet is affecting young people’s writing habits. A Stanford professor did a comprehensive study of college students’ academic and on-line writing and found that we’re “in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” On one hand, she might be overstating things. After all, these are Stanford kids she’s studying. You don’t get into Stanford without demonstrating some adeptness with written language. On the other hand, she is convincing when she points out that the average person writes more than before the rise of e-mail, blogs, message boards, Facebook, etc.
Wired articles have a tendency to overhype how all this kewl technology is changing our lives. You can express yourself well on Slashdot and still never pick up a book. It’d like to see another study that examines whether all this “life writing” makes us better critical thinkers.
For whatever it’s worth, I check a dictionary (okay, dictionary.com) many more times a day since joining facebook. I like to get my “peer-reviewed” status updates just so. The thrill of playing to an audience is a tantalizing carrot that has me using writing muscles I rarely flex otherwise. I think the oft-hyped connectivity – knowing that someone may actually “hear” me – sharpens my presentation a bit.
I just love that I learned the word “kewl.”