Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

In Clive Thompson on the New Literacy he explains the idea that technology, such as texting, twitter, facebook and emailing cause us to write more than any generation has before. Writing is evolving, not as John Sutherland puts it that technology is “kills” our literacy. “Kids today can’t write” But Thompson explains that actually kids are writing more now, not being forced to write by a professor or teacher about topics that most people do not have an interest in. This generation is writing about things that matter to them, it has more meaning to the individual. This creates better writing, in short social expression.
I myself agree with Thompson and what he is saying. It is actually really refreshing to read an article that is not saying that my generation is lacking brains, and that the way we use technology is making us stupid. We all have trouble trying to make sense when we are pressured to write in a way that we feel is unnatural. It distracts us from our own ideas and the points we are trying to make and replacing it with proper format, grammar, and punctuation.
For me personally I used to hate writing a lot because it was always a homework assignment that needed to be done a certain way. On a topic that well most of the time, I really did not care about or have any interest in writing a whole paper on. But then with facebook, you can write about things that are going on with your life. Not everything of course, but just a good or bad thing that happened in your day. And writing a letter compared to texting is time consuming.
We love to use this technology so much because we want a fast result, and we feel it is more important when we write a text message, emails, and facebook, because most of the time it is our friend and family we are writing it for. The experiment we did in class taught me that I explain things much better threw a text message then I do when I have to write it properly for a teacher. I had the person I sent the text about the article read the proper summary and he said that they both made since just the text was just a lot shorter and less time consuming to get through.
Also I really do not think, from my personal experience I have never had a problem with keeping in class writing separate from the writing I do threw texting and facebook. So to me this is not a big deal, that our generation writes the way we do. Maybe if people started excepting this new way to write, communicate and speak then we could create a way to get everything done faster a more efficiently. Just because it is not full,really thoughtful and or long does not mean that is a bad way to communicate. In our everyday lives we do not speak like we do in a paper so why should we have to write the same way on twitter, facebook, and texting?

Aubrie Todhunter