Are We Seeing More Illiteracy, Or a Literary Revolution?

by Mike Smith · 2009-09-02 06:57:00 UTC
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Wired revive the usual new-school year discussion—how kids can't write any more, and that technology may be to blame. But there's a twist. Clive Thompson discusses a potentially huge paradigm shift, asking whether we're seeing a literary revolution rather than increased illiteracy that's aided by Facebook, texting, and "dehyrated language." Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford, suggests that young people write far more than any previous generation. Having collected and analyzed 15,000 writing samples she concludes "we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." Literacy is doing more than just grow in one direction: It's exploding and branching off into completely new directions.

[Photo credit: Shareski]

Mike Smith is associate editor at Change.org.
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