I always thought that the explosion of personal writing (email, instant messaging, blogging, microblogging) as the internet has gained acceptance would of necessity lead to an improvement in writing skills; it’s difficult to see how a massive increase in the amount of writing people do would fail to have that impact.

Indeed, the Stanford Study of Writing documents just such an improvement, as Clive Thompson reports in Wired. (Via SarahM.)

Despite voice communication, video, and online gaming, the internet is still primarily a text environment, and will continue to be so. The technical restrictions that forced it to be almost text-only at first may have been around just long enough to force a sufficient mass of people to use text and realize how powerful and efficient a medium it can be—a realization limited to a vastly smaller number of people in the pre-online era.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 14:10 22 Sep 2009 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Literacy and Online Life”

1. 2BiT Says:
   24 Sep 2009 at 18:28

   Is that an ironic typo? Cos if it’s not it’s pretty funny :D

2. Tadhg Says:
   24 Sep 2009 at 19:52

   Not ironic—guilty of a typo in a bad post for a typo! Fixed now.

3. 2BiT Says:
   25 Sep 2009 at 01:48

   I’m such a pendant ;) hope ya had fun hunting it!

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website