Thompson Reading Response #1

In, “The New Literacy” a recent piece by Clive Thompson it is argued that technology is not ruining our generations writing skills but actually improving them. Thompson has found, “…technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s revising it-and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.” The methods used have been adjusted to fit the audience, so the students have discovered a true purpose for their writing. Thompson doesn’t come out and state directly, however he did imply that Americans are better off now since we do have the ability to write on the internet. Before hand people would complete their assignments to pass school but once that was over a lot of cases showed that they wouldn’t put together another sentence again.


One consequence of Thompson’s theories is that the counter argument proposes the internet has been draining our language. It was called by a professor, John Sutherland, from a University College of London, “bleak, bald, sad, and shorthand.“ With the fast small instant messages, egotistic videos and blogging this is apparently going against the progress of our societies skills. There has been question of an new illiterate age coming but this has been shown to clearly not be the case.


My personal view is that technology has been useful for refining my techniques and just giving me more practice. I love being able to chat with people, it offers plenty of opportunities to share stories with friends, and getting others opinions. It makes me able to relate to what Thompson was sharing about us being more aware of changing our tone for our listeners. I do notice that some of my own responses are simple smiley faces or one word answers I still am able to hold onto the big picture of writing. For example, I use writing as a way to vent my thoughts and I feel it has been great practice for me and I grew to love this style of talking even more then usual. Although some might oppose the constant usage of phones and computers I truly believe they have advanced us, us being this generation of students, in multiple ways.


This issue is important because there are also times where the internet can take advantage of a students time, instead of studying we could be found on facebook, twitter, and myspace. Therefore it is hard to see that technology is helping us when it is taking up hours we could be spending to work for classes or something of greater value. However it is important to analyze that we have gained from the small writings that are given by these websites. And there is no need to worry about the shortened words or phrases to be found in any of the papers or work that is due. Just because computers and cell phones are incredibly common does not mean by any stretch that this is going to change how we write. Andrea Lunsford, a professor at Stanford University, expressed her opinion and stated, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” We should embrace this “revolution” and truly start to prove that this generation is very different.