Reading Response #1
The technological advances of the 21st century have brought socializing to a whole new level. Talking to anybody even if they are across the world has become as easy as calling, emailing, texting or using Facebook or any other of the social networks that have been established. Still, just like any other technological advancement, there are drawbacks. Critics have warned that engaging too heavily in these activities could affect our writing skills and have a negative impact intellectually.
Despite this, in his recent article “On the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson has the audacity to attempt to refute the fact that Facebook is killing our writing. His main argument revolves around a study done at Stanford by Andrea Lunsford in which she took thousands of samples of student writing at Stanford and concluded from her results that literacy is thriving despite our social networking habits. She says that people today write far more than people in the past and praised the open environment of the internet for helping people develop their prose because they have a larger audience than just their professor.
This would be great except for a few problems. First, this study was done extensively only at Stanford and not at any other university. There are not enough different samples from different walks of life to be able to determine any conclusion. I hypothesize that if you take pretty much any paper from Stanford (where the GPA to even get in is around 3.9) you could easily determine to your own ends that the English language is fine. Now if this study had been done by randomly selecting people from all walks of life and of all different intelligences and they came up with the same result I would feel more inclined to listen to what they were saying. Nobody at Stanford is going use “text speak” as Andrea Lunsford said in their papers because if they did, they wouldn’t be going to school at Stanford in the first place.
Secondly, the article remarks about how “young people today write far more than any generation before them.” That would be perfectly fine except we know what we write when we text and Facebook has no meaning to it whatsoever most of the time. Compare the writings of George Orwell for example to that of a status update and we immediately have a problem. I would much rather listen to Orwell give a critique of our society by symbolizing it through a dystopian novel, than read someone’s comment on a picture on Facebook that has no redeeming value. What I’m trying to say here is that it is quality before quantity and not the other way around.
Also pertaining to this point is another thing mentioned in the article in which Lunsford compares our new writing habits to that of ancient Greek civilization. The argument that she is trying to convey is that back then, people held events in which they all talked together in groups and the socialization aspect was more synchronized just like how we all talk together on the internet. This I feel is a very weak argument at best and is a terrible analogy that tries to give redeeming value to our new way of life. Again I have to point out my argument of quality over quantity. While both societies mentioned are more connected than the “asynchronous” society before us that is where the similarities end. The asynchronous society though not as connected, proved far more useful intellectually than anything we have written or for that matter read today.
No comments:
Post a Comment