Clive Thompson on the New Literacy, Wired, 17.09
Is digital technology making writing worse? That’s the folklore these days, dire predictions that we’re heading toward a new “age of illiteracy.” Facebook, then Twitter; next up, the Dark Ages.
However emerging research suggests otherwise. In a recent Wired feature story, Clive Thompson reports on The Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study that collected 14,672 student writing samples. The results of this project suggest that we’re actually headed toward a “literacy revolution” that is “reviving” writing and “pushing our literacy in bold new directions.” First off, students are doing more writing than ever before, because, as Thompson says, “so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38% of it took place out of the classroom.”
But isn’t a lot of this writing just quick-and-dirty, one-sentence, badly spelled, egocentric tweets? Is there any intellectually deep or significant writing? Well, much of this writing might be short, but the research team found that it was remarkably sensitive to its audience. The team found that “the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos — assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.”
Digital technology is certainly changing what it means “to write well” — and those changes are not necessarily bad. What constitutes “good writing” on the Internet may actually be taking us back in time to more traditional notions of “good rhetoric” as requiring effective public interaction sensitive to its context — its time, its cultural location, its audience.
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This study really made me think a while back when I picked it up on Slashdot. Growing up on a computer, I can remember as early as middle school asking teachers if I could do essay tests on a computer (see this story about the death of cursive writing). Being able to type not only speeds up the average student’s writing process, but it also adds a bit of a crutch, enabling the writer to ignore things that might otherwise occupy your mind, like careful handwriting and hand-formatting, not to mention granting the ability to easily edit or move the thoughts on the page. The point about use of kairos is great as well, as often writing on the Internet is specifically made to voice an opinion or make a point, and it requires the writer to know who they’re writing it to. Transferring this ability to the completion of academic papers leads students to prepare assignments to a teacher or professor, which may actually improve the quality of work, and is eventually a critical skill when attempting to write professionally to a larger audience.
In addition to all of the above, I know for a fact that I’m 100 times smarter on a computer…that’s science
Fascinating article, Jim. There is a presumption, it seems, that technology isolates, dumbs down, and reduces the quality of our communication and interaction. In most cases, it seems to be just the opposite. There is study after study that shows our students have a wider circle of friends, deeper conversation, and more complex reasoning and writing skills than those previous. The implications for curriculum, though, are not trivial, as I am sure you wrestle with on a daily basis.
On an semi-unrelated note – did you see this graph of the study results: http://ssw.stanford.edu/research/kinds_of_writing.php – impressive and, I wonder, representative??? I doubt our freshman are doing grant writing much. It is an interesting list of writing types and even more interesting to note that it seems like they do less in the fourth year than first.
To write effectively in digital spaces — meaning, literally, with *effect* on an audience — requires a bunch of knowledge that is not always explicit in the writing itself, but is implied by it: knowledge like understanding of audience, but even more broadly than that, of culture and cultural assumptions, of history and context, deep understanding of the moment … in a word, kairos. Digital writing might well be leading us toward shorter writing — I don’t know, I haven’t seen any studies about that — but in a condensed form it certainly has to pack more punch. That was an interesting graph from the Stanford study, and it confirmed what we were seeing when I was at Michigan State University: the amount and variety of writing dropped off in the 3rd and 4th years, to the detriment of the graduates in their first few years of professional life. The B-School was trying to do something about that … but “doing something” almost always means hard instructional work and often additional cost, too (e.g., smaller classes that allow instructors to do deep engagement with student writing).
As a means of transmission, that is to say sending data from point to point(s) digital is much more robust than analogue, as it is capable of correcting errors that occur in the transmission process.
The ability to compress digital data allows much greater amounts of data to be sent in a given bandwidth, but this does cause some impairment to the signal, and particularly when high levels of compression are used and there are a lot of fast changes in the image.
Since there is a financial incentive to increase the number of channels of TV that can be sent over a carrier, it is not entirely unexpected that compression may be excessive.
However, these degradations are generally brought about by your usual friendly profit motive, and the possibility to encrypt and make signals available only to selected destinations by reason of content or on the basis of payment, is also reckoned as advantageous in this respect.
Certainly FM radio is slightly better quality than DAB, again due to the comprson used in DAB to allow a greater number of channels on the carrier.
Digital clocks and watches? Surely these differ only in the format of the display, rather than using digital means of operation? However, if any comment is appropriate here, a programme or timetable listing necessarily uses a printed digital format, so a digital clock, displaying time in the same format is surely quite acceptable, and given that there are 24 hours in a day, a digital time display can be easier to read than a sweep hand indication.
In practice, a digital clock is easier to read “time now”, whilst a sweep hand (analogue) clock is easier used to show “time until, or since”.
The matter you raise about disappointment with digital TV’s is more about the system of display rather than digital or analogue. The modern flat screen TV’s (which are, admittedly, digital) use LED and Plasma display panels rather than the traditional CRT which many regard as providing a better picture.