Reading Response No. 1

In his recent work, Clive Thompson suggests that the induction of technology has started a literacy revolution, forever changing the way we write. Thompson tires of all the pundits fretting about how kids today can’t write – and that technology is to blame. Thompson, with the help of Andrea Lunsford a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University contest that technology is pushing our literacy in bold new directions and that technology is here to help not hinder our writing. From 2001 to 2006 Andrea collected 14,672 student writing samples – everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts and chat sessions, concluding that technology might have gotten a bad rap.

Although Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that the education of academic writing in University and Colleges haven’t kept up with the technology wave. In fact students write more today than any other generation and technology is to credit. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, e-mail and texting are just a few examples; Thompson notes that before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. The vast majority of teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. Thompson states that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in his generation did) giving them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In addition, different audiences expect different types or formats for texts. Readers of Environmental Impact Statements don't want to read rhyming poetry extolling the virtues of nature. Mothers getting letters from children don't want to read a laboratory report about the events of the past month. Knowing the knowledge level of your audience will help you determine how to write, how much information to include, how long to make your text, how subjective or objective you should be, and how formal or informal your text should be and technology greatly improving our ability to write to/for these audiences.

My own view is that technology is the reawakening of writing, I personally facebook, twitter, myspace, text and e-mail at least ones ever hour. Though I concede that technology can promote narcissistic blabbering, I still maintain that technology is here to help, not hinder. For example Yume-Hotaru's first novel was a best-seller in Japanese bookstores, and he wrote it entirely with his thumbs on a cell phone, reports CNN.com (link below). Lara Farrar a CCN reporter states that since it emerged in Japan nearly a decade ago, the cell phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, has moved from a little-known subgenre to a mainstream literary phenomenon. Keitai shosetsu sites boast billions of monthly users while publishers sell millions of copies of cellular stories taken from phones and turned into paperback. Although some pundits might object that a cell phone novel is in no means academic writing, I reply that the people have spoken the books are becoming best-sellers. The issue is important because the pundits as Thompson would put it, encompasses a large present of professors in our educational system and those pundits need to embrace technology not turn there back on it. Times have changed, technology is here to stay, and it’s started a literacy revolution, net/net the education system of academic writing needs to evolve with technology, work together and move forward – currently it’s stagnant.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/25/japan.mobilenovels/index.html?iref=newssearch