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

Urbis is a cool web 2.0 writing review site. Basically, the premise of the site isn’t very new. Essentially, it is peer review with sprinkles on top. However, it is executed in a particularly effective way. When you register, you can post your writing for other people to review. You can also review other writing that has been posted. When you do, you receive credits. Those credits can be used to unlock reviews of your own writing. This way, you are encouraged to review other user’s writing and to not simply leach off the community. Overall, the site offers a good service.

When I look at a social media site, I like to think of it as a financial investment. You put something in and hopefully get back more than you put in. For instance, in the case of Digg, you submit articles (the expense). You can also view what other people have dugg to find good news (the revenue). If you are especially lucky, one of your articles will reach the top and receive thousands of views (the jackpot). Just ask your stock broker, the guarantee of a return and the chance of an immense profit is a good investment.

Now, turn back to Urbis. Our investment is the time we spend writing reviews. In return, we receive credits which can be used to purchase the reviews of our own work. However, here’s the catch. When buying reviews, we spend 30% then the person writing the review received. Why the processing fee? It’s not as though there is some brokerage that we need to pay? (This is all hypothetical money) In fact, you are guaranteed to lose credits if you buy the exact same review you wrote. Possibly, this could be to encourage users to write more reviews. However, I am certainly not happy with an investment where I am guaranteed to lose credits. Are you?

Despite the strange credit charges, the system is pretty slick with all the coolest social features like tags, comments, and goals. However, there is too much emphasis placed upon writing length. For reviewing, this makes sense since you had to spend more time reading the original piece. However, when buying reviews of your own writing, why should you be paying more just because the reviewer added a few extra words or you have an extra stanza? Bluntly, Urbis puts quality over quantity - something no creative group should ever do. Still, the service has its merits if you want to find an audience that will actually read your work and give educated criticism. Urbis is a credit-based peer review service.

If you want to give Urbis a try, please post in the comments so I can send you an invite. The more people you invite, the more credits for you… without having to go through all that trouble of actually thinking.