Article Response, HGowen

In the article “The New Literacy” by Clive Thompson, he shows that there are many people in our world that think the new technology is causing people to lose the ability to write as well and as much as we used to. He describes this as “Dehydrated language into bleak, bald, sad shorthand.” He then goes onto describing a women’s point of view, Andrea Lunsford. Reading her research, it states that she thinks just the opposite. She stated, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” She is explaining that she thinks people are writing more than we ever had. Meaning that people now have an audience and not just on person they are writing to. She also explains how people are better at getting their point across to others and changing the way they write to get their point across the most effective way. Thompson suggests that people learn from whom they are writing for.

I feel that technology is just expanding out ways of communicating and conversing. There are so many ways to communicate, that some people forget about how we used to do things. These new technologies are things that people enjoy to do. Not only are these new technologies more effective, but also they are easier to use. I feel like no matter what people’s views are, technology is only going to become more effective and more is going to be invented. With all of these new inventions, people are almost always communicating in some way. For example, Face book and Myspace are two of the sights where people communicate most. People don’t realize that writing about what you’re doing that day is a way of communicating. It’s expressing your own feelings out to a bigger audience. Our way of communicating is not hurting us like Thompson believes.