Lia: Clive Thompson Review

Clive Thompson on the "New Literacy" wrote an article on the new revolution of writing. Thompson brings in interesting perspectives that are very intriguing and in my opinion, to be very accurate. Most people today believe that we are loosing all the common sense of writing due to technology and its enabling us to not come up with things of our own to write. Andrea Lunsford makes an interesting point when she says that we are "life writing" in today's world-we are not loosing our sense of literacy, we are actually enhancing it. With all of the texting, emailing, blog posting, Twittering, and other forms of writing, there is writing all around us. Even writing this blog post is adapting to today's society in writing. John Sutherland, an English professor at the University of London, has an interesting counterpoint that we are, "dehydrating our language...narcissistic blabbering," and that all of the online text is, "bleak, bald, sad, and shorthand." This point might be true but we aren't loosing any literacy. According to most we are actually doing more writing than people did back in past years, when they would have graduated they would have never written a single word again. Today we are constantly writing for an audience and striving to please them. So this "new writing revolution" is probably in fact a good thing for us and Thompson agrees; we are gaining literacy and not diminishing it.