"Clive Thompson on the New Literacy"

For all of technology’s supporters, there is always its fair share of opponents, especially when it comes to academics. For some, technology is a blessing and for others, it’s disastrous, it has the ability to control our tones as writers, and our thoughts as communicators, but what impact is it really having on us? Clive Thompson’s article, “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” explores student’s writing skills in present day and how they’ve developed since technology has came onto the playing field. Andrea Lunsford, who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University claims, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” She believes that the revival of writing may be accredited to all of the technological opportunities we have offered to us in our society. She did a study on some of her students and discovered that thirty eight percent of their writing took place out of the classroom. Popular sites such as facebook and myspace are known for their blogging, status updates and surveys, which are all forms of writing. Some people argue that the writing you do on websites, could negatively affect your school work. Thompson offers the other side of the argument by saying, “When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.” In other words, students are writing more outside of class, which in turn is causing them to develop a broader range of tones for their audiences, as well as a better sense of vocabulary and sentence structure. Social networking sites can be very addicting because there is always someone to talk to and something to read or write about, but is that such a bad thing? Technology allows us to express ourselves in a way that’s considered acceptable by our peers, while giving us the freedom of being who we are without the stress of being graded on our blog posts or messages. Of course, there will always be people on the other end of the spectrum who look at technology as demeaning and a waste of time, but if we compared their writing abilities to people who use it everyday, would their skills add up?
Thompson ends his article by stating, “We think of writing as either good or bad. 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.” He believes that people really can acquire skills through technology and that we are, in fact, learning from it, and displaying it in classrooms. However, why does writing have to be so black and white? Why can’t we find a middle point and accept it for what it is, and what technology is allowing it to become? It’s a source of expression, as well as a gateway to more opportunities, that will be easier to seize if we learn to accept its benefits as well as its faults. When it comes down to it, we will never really know if technology has made us more cultured, or literate, but what we do know is, as Lunsford mentioned, we’re in the midst of a “literacy revolution” and maybe it’s to technology that we owe the gratitude to. The skills we acquire on the internet such as “persuading, organizing and debating” are traits that are sometimes required in the classroom environment, so the more these skills are practiced, theoretically, the better we’ll be at them, right? Cell phones, computers, iPods, televisions; they all seem to surround our everyday lives, so whether we choose to embrace them or shun them is up to us, but ultimately its becoming a part of our future, so we might as well acknowledge and come to terms with it. As far as Clive Thompson and Andrea Lunsford are concerned, technology is helping young writers grow and connect to their academics on a whole new level, and its here to stay.