Rethinking Literacy

September 23 2009 — JA

The argument that social networking is killing our literacy skills is an old one. According to the naysayers, our tweets, status updates, acronyms, abbreviations and (dare I say it) LOLcat captions are slowly bastardising language into a rudimentary and offensive form. Writing for the Unfit Times, Josh Rosenblatt aptly sums up the debate like so:

Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence ‘is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.’ And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as ‘bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness’ and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn.

But Stanford Professor Andrea Lunsford has put forward a different view. After orchestrating a project in which over 14 000 college writing samples were studied from 2001 to 2006, she concluded that we are ‘in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization’. And apparently, Twitter, Facebook, iChat and their online counterparts are leading the charge.

The fact that so much social communication is taking place online means that we are in fact writing more, not less. Rather than ‘dumbing down’ our literacy skills and promoting ‘ADD culture’, Lunsford believes that this is simply part of a greater paradigm shift. Clive Thompson of Wired Magazine went on to describe modern literacy as having ‘haiku-like concision’, claiming that the public nature of updates, discussion threads, comments etc. meant that communication today is ‘closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago’. Apparently, us tweeters and bloggers are adhering to the rhetorical practice of kairos – analysing our readers and adapting our ‘tone and technique’ to best get our point across.

I’m not sure that I’d argue in such dramatic terms about a ‘literacy revolution’ like Lunsford and Thompson, but it is refreshing to hear something other than purists bemoaning the death of literature. Anyway, as Rosenblatt says, ‘you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something’.