Reading Response: "The new literacy"

The new literacy is an article I’ve read recently written by Clive Thompson. In this article Clive is trying to explain how technology and social networking have effected and adapted our writing style and ability in recent years as compared to before things like the internet and cellphones. In this text Clive cites John Southerland, an English professor from the University of College London and Andrea Lunsford a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. John Southerland seems biased towards the side of pre-technology writing. He is quoted as saying texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand,” while Andrea Lunsford promotes the post-technology age as a more prominent time of writing. Thompson then goes on to present research Andrea has done on the topic (sampling 14,672 students writing from her school.) Andrea then goes on to draw parallels from social networks to the Greek forums citing that “we’re in the midst of a new literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” Thompson seems to agree with Andrea’s side of the debate citing her in almost every paragraph of the text while more or less one line to John. After reading the article by Clive I’ve found that I need more information on the topic to truly come up with a bias one way or the other. While Andrea does have some good research supporting her opinions I find her group of study limited. Many people would argue that 14,672 samples of writing is more than enough of a base to her argument, I find that the time and school that the samples were taken from were too limited. Her samples were taken on from one school, highly touted as well, and were only from the span of 2001-2006. In order to get a true grasp of the effect of technology on writing I believe that she would have to look at texts from the pre-internet era as well, not only afterwards. Another point that Lunsford made is that students of this modern technological age have learned to write more to their target audience as opposed to just writing to no audience in particular. She accredits this to a rise in social networking, again in her studies she’s found that her students commit 38% of their writing out of the classrooms socializing over the internet. While this is another valid point she has made I take her research with a grain of salt knowing that it has all been conducted at one single university. Clive states that students today almost always write for an audience which helps give them a sense of good writing. He believes that writing is about “persuading and organizing and debating” which students these days engage in more than ever via twitter, facebook etc…
This is probably the statement in Clive’s text that I’m most inclined to agree with, while I am not a regular user of social networking websites and whatnot I have witnessed their popularity which undoubtedly has had an effect on how people write. In conclusion, I feel like Clive has brought up some very valid and interesting points. I feel like a lot of his statements have some validity to them and I do believe this jump in technology and socialization has had an effect on writing without a doubt, a person like me will need a little more hard evidence to buy into the belief that social networking is completely revolutionizing writing by the younger generation.