newly ancient

This article is long overdue, but I still feel the need to write it. Last month, the PEW Internet & American Life Project released a report on “writing, technology and teens” which sought to explore the effect of technology upon teenagers’ writing. However, I think much of the analysis is flawed, starting with the summary:

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.

So that’s supposed to be a bad thing, that we don’t see email or text messaging as “writing?” Honestly, do you? Sure, it’s typing, but it’s not writing because writing requires thinking. (Obviously, there are plenty of exceptions to this, but in general emails and text messages don’t have much thought to them.) However, the report does work to address misconcenptions many idiots digital immigrants have about technology and writing:

A considerable number of educators and children’s advocates worry that James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was right when he recently suggested that young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging “the basic unit of human thought – the sentence.”1 They are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts.

Ahem. The basic unit of human thought is not the sentence. If that were true we would have to assume great artists do not think, and neither do excellent engineers (that one’s debatable :)). Of course, any report about technology and teens would be lacking if it didn’t mention the “negative influences on the quality of their writing:”

• 50% of teens say they sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation in their school assignments
• 38% say they have used text shortcuts in school work such as “LOL”
• 25% have used emoticons in school work.

I don’t think technology is at all to “blame” for improper capitalization and punctuation… haven’t you been seeing that for years, far before the prominence of the web?

Putting aside those issues, I have to agree with Clay that the researchers really don’t grasp the nature of teen blogging. That’s the only way we could get statistics like this:

47% of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more compared to 33% of teens without blogs.

My question is: how do the other 53% of teen bloggers write on their blogs? If they’re not writing outside of school for personal reasons, how are they bloggers? I do not think one can be counted a blogger simply if you have ever written on a blog (including forced school blogs)… you have to actually run your own blog, which you contribute to voluntarily. I think there is far too much ambiguity within the term “blogger:” most people simply call anyone who writes on the web a blogger. In reality, there are massive differences between writing for school, posting to Twitter, writing on MySpace, and maintaining a public, voluntary blog. Just as picking up a pen does not make you a writer, pressing a key does not make you a blogger.

Overall, I think this report once again underlines that blogging is not a silver bullet, which will magically improve writing. However, web communications also do not harm the quality of writing. If anything, blogging can make personal writing just a little bit more interesting, just a little bit easier. And sometimes, that little bit is all it takes.

What do you think should be the definition of blogging? Does virtual communication improve writing or does it harm grammar?

1. Photo by Paul Worthington on Flickr