Reading Response #1

Victor Volz
April 8, 2010

In his latest work, Clive Thompson introduces a proposition that was put forth by academic pundits whose opinions were that the advent of new information technologies and social networking sites, e.g., Facebook™,Twitter™, Myspace™, etc. are fortuitously inducing people to utilize improper syntatical composition, as compared to traditional and scholarly standards, while also concomitantly using vapid lexical faculty. Parenthetically, this evidence is being shown through the use of internet slang, a bunch of rather new initialisms and acronyms that have been created, adopted, and applied mainly by the younger generations or the, "digital natives"(Prensky, 2001). However, Thompson offers a retort from other professors of the field, such as, Andrea Lunsford, who propounds that these modern tools will acutally enhance literacy ability so much so that she equates it to be of similar significance to the Greek literacy revolution that had occurred about three millennia ago!

In my own personal opinion, such an avouchment would surely require some distinct and blantant evidence that we are verily approaching a reformation of that magnitude. Thompson is able to provide ample evidence that there is a great change, relavitely speaking, that is the process of transpiring and will continue to do so into the near future, however, I find his rebuttal and proof to be lacking in the substantial amount of evidence that would be indicative of, and possibly, needed to suffice for the grandiose claim that it will completely and totally alter our literal capacity. Although, I do agree with the prognostication which asseverates that there will in fact be a paradigm shift in regards to literacy and lingual capabilities anon, which may appartenly contradict what I previously mentioned, I am actually instead going to attempt to aid Thompson's proposal by adding in an appurtenant proposition of my own. This prescience that Thompson has proffered has apodictic proof to rely on, the reason being in that the natural inclination of progress, respective of almost any field of education, technology, etc., happens to advance at not just a linear rate, but accelerate at a logarithmic rate. While superficially it may appear that our quotidian confabulation are being transmogrified into a use of insipid and condensed 'adolescent' argot, this is perhaps, more likely, a minor deviating fad and is perchance part of a larger phase reposition that is being adumbrated into a new kind of communication and language, one that may surpass the parameters that are precariously established by our own lanugage today, how drastically it would change is still far beyond me, but I'm sure it would be colossal. The evidence, as aforesaid, is something I've chalked up to being apodictic and self-evident. The realization of this logarithmic rate of acceleration in practically all fields of human studies and endeavors helps give the substantial amount of evidence needed to forecast this next literacy revolution.

Thompson incites us to consider and even advocate this literacy revolution by presenting and demonstrating ideas that our writing has been influenced by who we are communicating to. Bascially put, our audience is of the utmost importance when choosing how we conduct our writing and how our sense of thoughtful and meaningful writing has changed. "The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world."(Clive, 2009). It is an interesting fact to weigh in how critical and prominent an influence our audience has on our writing, for instance, when conversing with our friends, usually, depending on the circumstances that our placed in our immediate environment, we won't strive to sound as sophisticated and educated in order to form concordance and conformity. During this social bonding there is an underlying foundation of how formal, or informal, we should be. The same concept could be said of writing, and that our audience, and their own receptions, also decided the specfic format of interlocution we employ. Factors that tend to impinge upon and promote these differences in conversational format are specialized environments, a few of which are conducive towards learning, teaching and organized debate, i.e., classrooms, courtrooms, town hall meetings, etc. Thompson emphasizes this point by mentioning that seldom have people ever needed to write at all except when being given an assignment by an instructor or teacher in the academic environment. He also provides an ancient Greek word to further elucidate his point, since it figuratively revolves around it, a word that rhetoricians call kairos--"assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across."(Clive, 2009)

In retrospect, most of this is just, in my viewpoint, nothing more than idle speculation, as no one could possibly predict the future with perfect precision and accuracy at this point in time, if ever, and by also ignoring all that other pseudoscientific junk that supports such a ridiculous notion. With that being said, we of course could be completely wrong and those pundits may have perceieved a larger and much more widespread problem with contemporary literacy skills then we had been able to notice. As a conclusion, I believe that, irrespective of my seemingly tenuous argumentation that was trying to assist Thompson's original representation of the idea that we are at the dawn of a positive literacy revolution, one on the likes of which we haven't seen, that are inquiry and debate will be answered and defused with only one variable in mind, that variable being time, it seems only time will tell.

References:

Clive, T (2009). "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy", Wired Magazine
Prensky, M (2001). "On The Horizon"