Clive Thompson- post by Dylan Langei

In the article "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy" Thompson follows a project called Sanford Study of Writing by Andrea Lunsford to shut down all the accusations that advanced technology today is hurting literacy skills, rather than helping them. Thompson specifically disagrees with John Sutherland's claim that "Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering. Video, and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essay, and texting has dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand". Thompson strongly disagrees with Sutherland in his article and Lunsford's study is a very convincing resource. Lunsford dedicated from the year 2001 to 2006 strictly to gather 14,672 student writing samples such as in-class assignments, formal essays, journal entries, emails, blog posts, and chat sessions to prove that a literacy revolution is derived from new technology. Based on Lunsford's study she believes that technology now created a literacy revolution as big as Greek civilization. Thompson also drives on the fact that 38% of Stanford student writing examples were from out of the classroom, so basically students were practicing writing without being in a classroom setting, and were writing for a hobby or social aspect. Before the Internet, students would write essays in class then never even get close to writing as much as students do now outside of the classroom because of Twitter or Facebook accounts.
Theoretically I would have to agree with Thompson just for the sole aspect that students are getting more practice writing and reading from new advanced technology. Right away when I think of new technology that involves writing I think of texting. I probably average 5,000 texts a month which are usually less than 160 characters long per text. So I am constantly writing out of the classroom and getting that practice. But then someone might say you're grammar skills could decline because of the mass use of abbreviations and carelessness in spelling. This is of course true; sometimes I won't fix my spelling because the other person knows what I meant. However, I am still getting an immense amount of writing practice because of new technology. Before computers were created people would use typewriters to publish papers, but how would they know if they were spelling a word wrong without stopping to check a dictionary and killing the flow of their writing? Now with new technology there is a spell check tool to correct your error and your learn to spell the word for future writing experiences. I know that I can look on my Facebook account and find misspelled words all over the place, but there are also good examples of writing like when you're writing about yourself using detail to produce quality, in depth writing. This relates to Thompson's article because when you are writing about yourself for an audience on Facebook, some quality writing comes out of it because you understand that it could be an important first impression on someone else. Also when you're talking to different audiences you practice changing your tone which is described as kairos in Thompson's article. When I chat with my mom on Facebook, it looks a lot different than when I chat with one of my guy friends because I have been trained to analyze my audience and write to please each group.