Digital Media Effects on Conventional Reading and Writing Practice

It’s difficult to get some folks to believe the claims made by Josh Karp’s article “Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers?” or Motoko Rich’s article “Online, R U Really Reading?”, especially if they are in my profession- teaching.  Even when a prestigious linguist like John McWhoter speaks in defense of text lingo, it’s hard to keep teachers from rolling their eyes.  Years ago many people sided with the early notion that social media, and other communication technology would bring about the end of what had been centuries of stable, sophisticated  English, and they have never bothered to take another look at contemporary trends or at history itself. 

The first thing to remember is that our rosy mental picture of history and “the good old days” is often incomplete.  This goes for language too.  Sometimes people read Hawthorne or Melville and make the mistake of thinking that this is how people used to communicate.  Yet, as Stanford professor, Andrea Abernathy Lundsford says “There never was a golden age where everybody could write well,’ says Lunsford. ‘Writing is hard” (Karp, 2010).  We should keep in mind that the great writers were exceptional in their time, that they were writing for their day, their culture, and telling their stories in a way that were making up as they went along.  Even our hallowed Shakespeare was “winging it.”  Many scholars and critics have shown that Shakespeare made up words, invented suffixes, and threw together some new terms and phrases to express himself to his culture in his time.  He changed the language for the 1600s.  Today, the changes continue.  “It was very clear as we entered the new millennium that writing was undergoing really, really profound changes, probably more so than in the last 2,500 years,’ Lunsford says. Writing, she says, is ‘a plastic art.  Writing always changes given the context. It molds itself to the changes” (Karp, 2010).  Just as The Bard’s context was the Renaissance of art of and philosophy, ours is the advent of unprecedented communication technology.  The changes will affect our language, and our language will contribute to the change.

One of the most notable changes at this time is what reading is, and how it is done.  “Reading” is no longer just looking at words on a page.  It is words, pictures, and color presented in a variety of formats.  While this change tends to disturb traditionalist it doesn’t frighten the youth.  “Young people ‘aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,’ said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. ‘That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters” (Rich, 2008).  Reading will continue to follow this trend, and writing will too. 

Thank heaven, then, for rational thinkers like John McWhorter.  A writer of great books about the history of English (that are entertaining even for we non-linguists), McWhorter approaches the whole topic with an informed perspective.  In his 2013 TED Talk, McWhorter cites many examples of critics who declared that English was about to die, before showing us that text lingo is not the death of language, but a type of language.  It’s a code that some switch to in order to communicate effectively within a certain context.  He is right.  Did Morse Code or telegrams ruin English?  Did the creation of ASL ruin English?

For a while now I have found myself more likely to side with the “Web Evangelist” side of the issue as opposed to the traditionalist harbingers of doom.  I do not believe that modern technology is destroying people’s ability to read and write, but rather has demanded of us a more engaged mind when interacting with the world.  We forget that it’s only recently that the general public had access to mass produced reading material, or the time to even read it.  It is likely that your great-great-great-great-grandfather and grandmother were working by the sweat of their brows from dusk to dawn, and weren’t doing a great deal of reading by candlelight each week.  While they were intelligent in their own way, and in their own culture, they were not nearly as well-read as the average twenty-something today.  When printing technology improved and changed publishing, more people read and the variety of reading material increased.  Thanks to digital publishing, this is happening again. 

So to my teacher colleagues who are concerned that this is the beginning of the end, I say think it over one more time.

References

Karp, J. (2010, January 26). Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers? | Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning. Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers?. Retrieved May 25, 2014, from http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/does-digital-media-make-us-bad-writers

McWhorter, J. (2003, February 1). Txtng is killing language. JK!!!. John McWhorter:. Retrieved May 25, 2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk

Rich, M. (2008, July 26). Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?. The New York Times. Retrieved May 25, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0