Half Way Point

This essay was written primarily to our class. My essay is tailored this way because I say things such as “The article we read in class.” Only people in our class would understand that because I don’t say in Andrew Sullivan’s article, Why I Blog, which we read in class, I simply reference Sullivan’s article and it’s implied from the knowledge of our class that everyone knows what I'm talking about. The article is also geared more towards young people. I don’t use as formal of a tone as I would if I'm writing a paper on the Supreme Court lifetime tenure like I did earlier in the year. I wrote it in a more relaxed tone because I feel it flows better. Now for the heavy stuff.

The other night I was watching Sportscenter before going to bed and I heard something that caught my ear. Reporters in the studios were talking about how at this weekends upcoming NFL Pro Bowl; players would be allowed to tweet during the game. I'm envisioning the following post from Aaron Rodgers after coming off the field, “Just threw a 46 yard touchdown pass, nice catch Greg. #NFCRULES” To me this exception to allow players to tweet during the game shows the types of writers we are becoming. Our writing isn’t the only thing that has been changing recently. With modern advances in the last ten years of the Internet, we are now relying on it more than ever for a lot of our information. It’s easy to use, and doesn't take long to search. Carr uses a metaphor that I particularly like to describe the way the Internet has changed. He says, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (1). Overall, I believe that due to the new age of technology, we have become more frequent, but not necessarily better writers, and worse readers for the time being because we have not yet adapted to the way information is intercepted.

            Of the readings we did in class, I feel that two writers in particular had the viewpoint that with the new age of technology our writing is improving and can only get better. These two writers are of course, Andrew Sullivan and Clive Thompson. Andrea Lunsford was featured in Thompson’s article On New Literacy for her research with the writing of freshman Stanford at University. Thompson writes, “The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text” (Thompson 1). Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and any other networking site for that matter lets you instantly post what you thinking, whenever you want. It’s ingenious, these sites have realized that teens want an outlet where they can publicly display what’s on their mind to an audience of their friends and family. Another result she found was:

The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago. The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing (Thompson 1).

She elaborated that because students almost always write to an audience, when they had to write only to the professor they found it boring and useless.

            Rather than using a social networking site to get his thoughts out onto the web, Andrew Sullivan _­takes a different approach, an approach where no friend request need be accepted. He uses a blog as his way of communicating with an audience, and a very large one at that. Blog are a useful tool for anyone who loves to write. Sullivan writes of his experience, “The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant” (Sullivan 3). The alternative he's referring to is print media, because he has been an editor and is currently a writer. I couldn’t agree more with what he said. There is a pretty big difference from his audience of millions of readers and my audience of fourteen class members, but it’s the same feeling of knowing what you just wrote is going to get read by someone. Sullivan compares uses the metaphor of blogging as an extreme sport, and I wish I felt the same way about it as he did. I'm sure when he writes his blog, its not in a word document like mine were, but even in Word you can make mistakes, “And the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.” Sullivan posts very often to his blog, which is part of the extremeness. If you don’t keep posting, people will lose interest. In essence, once you start, you can never stop. Sullivan explains:

You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality (Sullivan 5).

Because we can use new technology, our writing can become interesting to anyone who is willing to read it. It’s not hard to find, and it’s not like it’s not there. Technology has made us into instant writers, and I for one am happy because there will always be someone out there who you can relate to, through writing because there is plenty of writing to go around, all it takes it the patience and interest to dive in.

            As positive as Thompson and Sullivan are about writing, there are others that we read in class that don’t feel the same way. Hedges and Carr see the internet as a possible risk, specifically, Hedges, views the Internet as a major roadblock in our intellectual development. He states:

 The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying (Hedges 3).

This however, cannot possibly happen from extended Internet use. I mean come on, the ability to think for oneself and to distinguish between truth and lie. Those are human traits. They are hardwired into our brains from the time we are very little. Every time I lied when I was a kid my parents then showed no trust and little respect for me. This quickly taught me to never lie because the feeling of not being trusted by my own family was enough to make me never want to lie again. The Internet cannot take away trait that has been inherently humanistic for hundreds of years; it just can’t happen that quickly. Hannah Arendt was featured in Hedges’s article for saying, “Culture, is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment” (Hedges 3). When I read this, I was a little bit confused. Culture cannot be destroyed; it’s the customs that people do on a regular basis. Meaning, if people decide to shift away from their old customs and more towards their new ones of being entertained, then the culture of that group of people has changed, not been destroyed.  Aimlessly wasting time on the Internet cannot possibly do all of these things because humans are humans, we have the capacity to think at all times, even if at a very basic level.

            Nicholas Carr makes a much less harsh argument towards how the Internet impacts our ability to be better readers. At times, he questions his own thoughts to if something like this can possibly true. I believe he makes some very convincing points about the Internet, however, I believe he doesn’t think that humans will adapt and change to become more efficient readers when using the Internet. To show the massive reach that the Internet has over our lives he states, “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (Carr 4). This is true and unfortunate at the same time. The Internet will likely take over print media in most places and many inventions that we knew to be useful will cease to be popular. Having said that, I don’t believe print media will be completely extinct. There will always be people who feel like doing it the old fashioned way. Take the Amish for example, they will still be doing it the old way when most everyone makes the shift over to electronic news. I’d like to wrap up with a rather long but very important quote from Carr, which illustrates the type of readers we currently are. He says:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 1).

Our attention spans are shortening, but I think we have the ability to change the way we read. We are the type readers, and more importantly people, who have the capability to learn new things and always find interest in topics. We will never become the “Pancake people” that Carr mentions in his article because people are always curious and will pursue their interests deeply.

            Literary critics fear that the new age of technology, and advances in the Internet virtually absorbing all media sources are changing the way we read and write. Many cannot agree if it for better or worse. I for one think that it is changing people positively because we are exploring new bounds.