Alexandria's Blog on Clive Thompson and the New Literacy

The article “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” from Wired Magazine is an essay that is clearly stating that we are going through a literacy revolution. Thompson talks about how the Internet has created a world that revolves around writing, which connects many people, and gives them an audience where they will feel less pressured to write a formal essay, but just want to get their thoughts and opinions out there. Thompson claims we do more life-time writing today (since the Greeks) than the generations before us. Andrea Lunsford demonstrates his claim by showing how 38% of writing is done out of classroom from her collection of 14,672 student writing samples, (1). Thompson believes our American culture uses different texts to get their point across instead of writing a formal paper. Texting, blogging, emailing, and twitter are all forms of writing we use to persuade our audience and express ourselves these days. Thompson shows how although some people, like English professor John Sutherland, may think students have become illiterate, in reality we have just evolved in writing styles over the last 10 years. In the generations before, they almost never wrote anything again, once they were out of school, unless absolutely necessary. Andrea Lunsford states “That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text”, (1). In other words, our American culture consists of writing and reading written texts. Thompson’s argument goes on to say that we write extremely well when it comes to giving our writing a tone and getting our views across.
Although Thompson does not say so directly, he apparently assumes that technology is what is bringing about this change in our generation to where we can write better. He states “What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all”, (2). In my opinion, what he is saying is that our generation is always writing to an audience, whether they associate this audience as a friend or professor, their main goal is to persuade them or get their point of view across. Thompson seems to believe that this is one of the most important factors in writing. In order to be better writers, we need to write as if we are having a conversation.
My own view is that although we are very skilled at “kairos” we still need to make changes by not allowing technology to do all the work or allow us to become lazy. Though I concede that Thompson may be correct that technology is helping transform a new literacy, I still maintain that we shouldn’t lose the ability to write a formal essay. For example, my younger sister can’t write a formal paper, because she has become so use to having words abbreviated and just getting her point of view across, and doesn’t fully develop her thoughts or truly take the time to write a full paper because she doesn’t like to get too “wordy” as she calls it. She doesn’t see the point. Although some might object that these new forms of texts don’t limit the ability to express one’s thoughts in the way an audience can truly analyze; my response is that we must begin to use these new forms of life writings to our advantage. This will help us become wise and analyze them to form more complex formal essays. We can hopefully learn to keep the important factor of writing to an audience in mind, like we do when we are texting or blogging.


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