Archive for September 5th, 2010

I was warming up for DFW on the Web this Week when I came across a rather disturbing blog post (linked by @vedo’s  Next Communications blog) heralding what it called “Digital Darwinism.” The post argues that digital media is changing the way we think and socialize, and may ultimately kill off longer forms of writing:

There’s a saying, “technology changes, people don’t.” Yet, when we consider the impact of technology on our daily lives, some very interesting observations surface…A pen now feels awkward to hold and as such, our penmanship is deteriorating. It’s now common to sit at a dinner table with family and friends where some are actively communicating with others, listening to music or gaming via mobile devices … The future of the art of long form writing is at risk of becoming shrtr and less formal #forrealz …  

First: before we “write off” handwriting, as a teacher, I want everyone to know: handwriting is back in the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for elementary students. The Texas Education Agency has decided that handwriting is important for knowledge processing and this year I and other Texas teachers will begin to re-emphasize it. This is because, technology or no, at the current time there is no cognitavely equivalent replacement for taking notes by hand.  Writing it down makes you think more clearly … tweeting, at least for now, may or may not.

Secondly, it’s true, people sit around at meetings (not at my dinner table if they want to eat) and SMS message other people.  But meanwhile I notice that teenagers do not sit around for hours on the telephone, as we did. SMS simply replaces the phone-to-the-ear syndrome. And people who SMS others while in class or meetings are simply rude. We do not put up with that in schools and I’m hoping that other places will soon follow suit. SMSing people while you’re supposed to be listening is cognitively dysfunctional.  You can’t sit there texting people and comprehend a speaker as well.  If Digital Darwinism means survival of the intellectually fittest, behaviors which actually make you slightly dumber shouldn’t survive, right?

As for the people losing the ability to read long works, such as novels, I do believe we read less now than we used to — it’s been going on for decades.  That does not mean the long form of writing is dying out. Reading was endangered more than anything else by the arrival of TV. Today, with surfing the internet, reading is at least basically important to communication in a way it wasn’t twenty five years ago.  And novels, while they may be less popular than they were, are not going away completely. It takes relatively little resources to produce and maintain a novel reading culture within the greater one. The number of novel readers may be shrinking, but we are not going away.

So, to recap: knowing things in the “old fashioned” way, by reading and writing well edited and thought-out works, is not going to go away just because we can SMS or tweet clever and not-so-clever thoughts when we have them. The future still belongs to those who can think. Social media may be a boon or a burden on human cognition, but it’s not going to replace “traditional” modes of constructing meaning. Not IMHO, anyway, and with that, I’ll close this blog post before it reaches 600 words.