Essay roughdraft

Colin McMaster

WRIT 1122- 39

Professor Leake

30 January 2012

I have chosen to write this essay towards a person that is their college career. I chose that group people because this issue is most pressing to them, they are directly impacted by the developing use of the internet and online mediums.

Writing and Reading with Comprehension

Picture yourself, at your computer. It’s just like any other time you open your laptop at home or in class. Nine times out of ten a betting man would say that Facebook is the first thing to pop up. This is just a showing of how our generation is addicted to social media and constantly staying connected. Also it shows that we just plain get bored and want some simple entertainment. This search for constant entertainment is changing the way in which kids of the current generation are using the internet and that is also changing the way that we read and write.

Chris Hedges does not have the nicest opinion of the general American public. He sees us as only two classes of people, the literate people who are capable of complex thought and live in a print-based world. Then there is the other kind of people, the ones who can not read and write, rely on images for information, and have severed them self’s from the print-based world. This is a very basic and pessimistic view of our society, but is it really all that far off? We often do find ourselves avoiding doing things that will make us think hard or might make us go out of our way.

Hedges also discusses how the illiterate class is becoming more and more easily swayed by political rhetoric and the news media. This I feel is overwhelmingly true however it is not limited to just the illiterate. Even scholarly people can find themselves wrapped up in an extremely sensational news story to only finish it and feel almost less intelligent. The news we watch on TV and often read is unfortunately watered down to the point where it almost loses all of its credibility. Yet, people still trust it, and only it. When that happens and the television news isn’t reinforced with factual print articles, a person is left not fully informed and is not necessarily equipped with the right knowledge to let’s say pick a president. Candidates can easily fill their campaigns with easy to digest ideas and words that seem like they solve problems, but really just mask the problem and make themselves look better. They can get away with it because the “illiterate people” as Hedges puts it, just absorb and do not critically analyze it.

Through high school I was blessed with one of the knowledgeable teachers I think I will ever meet. Dr. Jim Harris is a PHD from the University of Kansas in Electrical engineering. He formerly owned his own company making electronic components for helicopters before retiring to teach at my high school. Dr. Harris was responsible for teaching the school physics, Honors physics, AP physics, and Astronomy. He had one very strong common theme that he tried to teach all of his classes, and that is “one, Physicists are lazy and two, read with comprehension”. He was under the impression that if his students could learn to read a question or text and understand it fully, he has succeeded in his lesson. According to Nicholas Carr however, we may be taking a step in the wrong direction.

Nicholas Carr finds himself asking the question, “is Google making us stupid?’ In his opinion we might be, but he does not really know if it is. Carr seems to have found himself in a not so good place, he can no longer pay attention to longer readings even if they are longer blog posts. This phenomenon seems to be happening more and more to him and his friends. I also find myself struggling to stay focused after a couple paragraphs. He thinks that our brains have possible reprogramed themselves to only enjoy short little streams of information, like a computer. He thinks that the constant internet browsing, only looking at short headlines, and going from video to video has reprogramed our brains to only except information, “the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”(Carr 1) That thought seems kind of scary when you listen to it. Something as arbitrary as the internet forcing our brains to change the way we think, no sir I’ll have none of that.

I don’t think that the internet is changing the way we read really, it has more the effect of changing what we are expecting to read. We find it easier to read smaller things that interest us and can be supplemented with videos we can pull up at random or quickly switch to a page that explains any confusion. We haven’t lost the ability to read books or long articles, we have just developed laziness towards reading or maybe even an internet induced ADD. This would make sense of our obsession with Facebook and YouTube; we are simply using them as vises for our “disorder”. We are still capable of reading in the old way; it’s just not nearly as fun. So, the internet isn’t so much making us stupid, it has just changed what we look for in reading. We go online to “avoid reading in the traditional sense.” (2)

Like with the printing press, some people believe that having vast knowledge available at our fingertips will detriment society by causing academic laziness and making an intellectual rely on a computer to reiterate his knowledge. But just like the printing press and the positives being over looked, even when the negatives were true, those overlooked positives made the printing press an easy way for people to share, spread, and spark new knowledge and learning.

With technology and the internet creating large gaps in the reading levels and things are becoming more available to the masses, what is happening to peoples writing? The internet has created a whole new place for people in instantly connect and share ideas. Most noticeable of these are places like blogger and Facebook. According to Andrea A. Lunsford and Clive Thompson kids are writing more than ever. Lunsford studied the writing of 189 Stanford students starting there freshmen year through graduation. What she and her colleges found gives hope that technology is not destroying our literacy. They found that students are writing significantly more than their parents did. Kids are writing not just school papers, but all the interaction on the internet is a form of writing. According to Lunsford writing in these different mediums has given us an advantage. The internet has not harmed writing but, “rather than leading to a new illiteracy, these activities seemed to help them develop a range or repertoire of writing styles, tones, and formats along with a range of abilities.”(Lunsford 1)

Lunsford’s team found that the students had a remarkable knack at writing in the style, “kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” (Thompson 1) This new knack of writing to a specific audience comes hand in hand with the internet. When writing a Facebook post, blog post, or just a tweet we know exactly who our audience is and write to get our idea or thought across to exactly who is seeing the post.

The internet has caused many shifts in the world we live in today. We have gone from a word were you could maybe get a newspaper two times a day, to a reality that news from every corner of the world is available with just a few clicks of a mouse. Being able to have everything so close has indeed made us lazy, as Carr and Hedges would agree with; but it also has created a generation that can write affectively that Lunsford and Thompson agree with. The difficulty is, literacy is both reading and writing, not just one. The problem with reading on the internet is that it makes us want to be there and enjoy ourselves while reading. After watching videos and reading short news reels no one want to read 200 pages out of a boring book. Our reading has become weaker simply because it seems to no longer be capturing out imagination. On the other hand writing is excelling because of the ever changing conversation on the internet. People are more aware of who their writing is going to and will tailor it to suit the audience. To bridge the gap between excelling writing and lazy reading, I believe teachers need to employ Dr. Harris’s approach. By making reading with comprehension a main goal, it can be possible to teach kids to read past false information and extract true meaning from online souses and mediums.