Extended Essay

Eunha So

Dr. Leake

WRIT 1122-63

01/26/13

New Generation of Literacy

            Why do babies cry? There is no way to tell why they are crying right away, but it is the way they communicate; hunger, fear, pain, fatigue, a need of something, and so on. It is how they express themselves until they are able to speak. They learn the language as they grow and listen to other people talking. They start to recognize what certain sounds or words/sentences mean, and then replicate those terms to convey what they want more specifically. However, for better communication with others in an intellectual manner, our society requires the skill to be able to not only listen and speak, but also to read and write. Centuries ago, the ability to read and write was given only for a few people like clergy, nobles and kings, but nowadays literacy, the ability to read and write, has become an important part of every individual’s daily life. Whether it is to read a book, a periodical, a text message, a menu at a restaurant, or a presentation at a meeting. Scribner explains in her writing Literacy in Three Metaphors,  “we all encounter situations requiring us to read or produce written symbols” (9). Like myself, people go to school to learn how to read and write. I have been reading and writing for 13 years, yet I am still taking an English class in college to enhance my reading and writing skill. I believe that the higher quality of literacy I have, the more effectively and efficiently I will be able to absorb information and state my thoughts to the others, thus become more successful in society.

            Since technology has advanced, the availability of literature resources has spread worldwide. This allows anyone to access the information from anywhere at anytime. The Internet is one of the main advancements that has helped literary resources to be shared faster and more extensively. “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies” (Carr 4). I moved to the United States from Korea in 2008. It has been five years since I have been in Korea. The only way I can keep myself updated with current events in Korea, is the Internet. I can get messages or emails about what is happening in my friends and family’s life, and look up what current affairs (such as political issues, entertainment news, living culture and etc.) are taking place in their communities. I use Facebook to read my friends’ daily life stories, post my own, and visit Korean websites regularly to read news articles and blogs. In Why I Blog, Andrew Sullivan claims that uploading a post on a blog is “a form of instant and global self publishing” (1).  It lets people from anywhere to have an easier access to post and read plenty of writings. Nicholas Carr writes that the “Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind” (1). It is incredible how we can get such numerous information and news from the other side of the world immediately, almost as if we live there.

The evolvement technology has various positive influences on our literacy other than being a medium to stretch out our resources to the other societies. For example, since English is my second language I use Google as a method for me to check my words, phrases or sentences, and also use it to find answers to my questions; ‘where is the ‘track recording enable button on Garage Band?’ or ‘Is it okay to take Claritin D with Nasonex’, and more. It is so much faster than going to the library to read a manual about a computer program or to call pharmacy to check if there is any conflict to take those two medicines at the same time. My music theory professor uploads the textbooks for his class on the school website so the students can download them on their computer instantly. I look up food recipes online, instead of having to purchase a hundred-page cooking book just for the one recipe that I need for one special dinner. One-click shopping websites like Amazon allow people to get products much easier and faster. They are very similar to the actual walk-in stores. Customers can view the pictures and descriptions of products, use customer service, and compare the price, quality and the customer reviews all in one sitting. The new technology is extremely beneficial to make an effective management of time for the busy modern people.

The new technology has changed many things in people’s life style. People are moving away from printed newspapers in recent years. Instead many read them online, such as The New York Times, ABC News and Yahoo! News, because it is faster and cheaper than reading the printed version. Who would pay $8.05 per week for The New York Times daily home delivery, when you can pay only $3.75 per week for unlimited access on any electronic device? People do not want to waste money or be inconvenienced. Peoples’ life styles have changed very dramatically from decades ago; they might not be home waiting for the newspaper every morning. They could be on a business trip in a different state, or go on a vacation in another country. It fits more for them to read news articles on a cell phone or a lab top that they carry around and use to multitask.

Society, specifically the modern person, does not possess the ability to expend energy on time consuming hobbies. People are always busy and pressed for time working, taking care of a family, finishing school work, and so on. They prefer to read and write simply, with a specific purpose in mind. The length does not really matter, because even if it is an extended writing, people will read as long as they do not lose interest in it. For those who are worried about some one admitting “ ‘I can’t read War and Peace anymore,’ ” (Carr 2), or feel sorry how people do not realize that “ ‘Hamlet’ can be as entertaining as ‘The Lion King’ and perhaps as educational” (Hedges  3), I want to ask why they feel that it is so important to be able/wanting to read these works. The world has changed; we are not living in 17^th or 18^th centuries anymore. Of course, I am not opposed to reading those writings, people can read it if they want to and are interested in the literature during those time periods. What I am wondering is if this is necessary for the literacy in our generation. Why does our literacy have to be judged upon those archaic pieces of literature? Scribner notes “[literacy] is a social achievement; individuals in societies without writing systems do not become literate. Literacy is an outcome of cultural transmission” (7). I agree that literacy is an “outcome of cultural transmission”. The advance in technology has brought an enormous impact on our culture and society, and caused changes in our literacy. However, I perceive that some people determine the level of our literacy out of context, and conclude that it is going down based on whether we can read 17^th and 18^th century’s literature.

Hedges argues that “There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year” (1). Hedges made it seem like the level of literacy in U.S. is going down, but “according to the Census Bureau's decennial census, U.S. population is growing by approximately 3.3 million per year” (Elbel 1). In reality, 1.3 million people are becoming literate a year, so the percentage of U.S literacy rate is actually increasing.

I am not trying to say that all of the American’s ability to read and write has improved. As Scribner mentions, “literacy may be increased for some and reduced for others” (11). What I believe is that the changes in the style of our literacy caused by new technology are not harmful, and if anything new technologies are helping us to develop our literacy.  Lunsford explains how technological developments have helped with students’ literacy. First, “they were most interested in and committed to writing out of class, what we came to call “life writing,” than they were in their school assignments. Second, they were increasingly aware of those to whom they were writing and adjusted their writing styles to suit the occasion and the audience.  Third, they wanted their writing to count for something”(1). Innovations such as the Internet and cell phones have given students more opportunities to write and read, and those experiences are helping increase the level of students’ literacy. For example, “the length of student writing has increased nearly three-fold in these 25 years, corroborating the fact that students today are writing more than ever before”, and it applies to the students who take the advantage of the strengths of new technology to develop their literacy.

People acknowledge the importance of literacy and strive for more advances and development in their ability to read and write. For those people, new technology can be a beneficial tool to achieve their goals. They can immediately access and collect any information from different countries using the web, expand their knowledge, and they can express their ideas and thoughts to the world. All of this can be done easily with less time consumption. People can find and utilize so much information; more than they were ever able to before. It is time to change the old mindset about literacy, and modernize it. It is up to the people to take advantage of new advanced technologies and use them as a tool to enhance their literary capabilities, instead of letting technology take advantage of them.

Works Cited

Hedges, Chris . "America the Illiterate." Truthdig. N.p., 8 Nov. 2010. Web. 25 Jan. 2013.

<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/>.

Lunsford, Andrea. "Our Semi-Illterate Youth: Not So Fast." Stanford. N.p., n.d. Web. 25

Jan. 2013. <www.stanford.edu/group/ssw/cgi-bin/materials/OPED_Our_Semi-Literate_Youth.pdf>.

Sullivan, Andrew. "Why I Blog ." The Atlantic. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2013.

<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/>.

Scribner, Sylvia. "Literacy in Three Metaphors." American Journal of Education 93.1

(1984): 6. Print.

Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly, July 2008. Web.

27 Jan. 2013. <http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/>.

"The New York Times - Home Delivery." The New York Times - Home Delivery. The New

York Times, n.d. Web. 27 Jan. 2013. <https://nytimesathome.com/hd/205?MediaCode=W22EJ&CMP=3FQ49>

Eibel, Fred. "U.S. Birth Rates, Population Growth, and the Environment - SUSPS." U.S. Birth

Rates, Population Growth, and the Environment - SUSPS. SUSPS, n.d. Web. 27 Jan.

2013. <http://www.susps.org/overview/birthrates.html>.

#6 Reflection.

My experience in writing and responding for these blog posts has been good so far. It helped me with not only developing my writing skill but also my reading skill-my literacy has been improved by far. English has never been my strongest nor favorite subject. Especially reading in English was so hard for me, because I was used to being able to read in Korean so fast, I could not bear the fact I had to read slowly in English. First Reading assignment was reading Andrew Sullivan’s article seemed like I could never finish it. I did not know how to start reading, nor analyze his thoughts. However, as people say, “the first step is the hardest”, once I got the knack of literacy, other assignments became easier and more interesting as I got into them. 

            Other thing that I found out was that reading and writing on the web could be different than what I thought. The things I have read and write on the web before was mostly to talk to my friends, teacher and my family (like Facebook and email), or once in a while I would read news articles. I have not used it in a way to writing academic writings, however, I figured that posting a blog is just same as writing a paper, print, and turn it in to the professor. Plus, it is a faster and easier way to share my work with my peers and professor. In the process of blogging for my English class, my view on the academically reading and writing on the web has been changed positively.

#5 literacy of our generation.

         Literacy, “the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and think critically about the written word.” (Wikipedia). It is a skill that an individual needs to have this ability to communicate with the society (used on our daily life from at school and work to little things like texting and sending / receiving an email). Its necessity is vary depends on the different situation, culture, society, people and so on. 
         As technology advanced, our form or literacy also has been changed, and it is causing some literacy concerns for some people. As I mentioned in the previous blog post “The evolution of reading”, and only so in Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and Chris Hedges’s “American the Illiterate.” Hedges’s and Carr’s opinion was that people started to read online short stories that only summarized essential information, and it led people to gain more amount of information, but it brought down the level of their literacy, because people these days can not tolerate big literary works such as War and Peace and Hamlet.

           While Hedges and Carr has negative opinions about the literacy of our current generation, Scribner and Thompson has positive thoughts about how the literacy is changing. In the essay, “Our Semi-literate Youth?  Not So Fast” , Thompson says the technology development is helping us to improve our literacy. His reasoning are “the length of student writing has increased nearly three-fold in these 25 years”, “the ratio of errors to number of words has remained stable not just for twenty-five years but for the last 100 years.”, and also the autocorrect helps with students spelling problems. He proved that people are aware of what style they need to use depends on whom they are speaking to, and the technology helped people to be able to do that (e.g. texting a friend and writing a paper to submit to professor). Scribner says literacy is “individual abilities”, “social achievement; individuals in societies without writing systems do not become literate”, “an outcome of cultural transmission”.  It is an individual activity so there is no way to measure whether our literacy level has been decreased or not. I thought Carr and Hedges’s opinions were extremely limited to certain types of people when Scribner and Thompson’s ideas were applicable to more broad people. Scribner uses metaphors to define her definition of literacy: “Literacy as adaptation, literacy as power, and literacy as a state of grace”. It seems to me that she thinks the usage and the meaning of literacy can be different from places to places and from people to people, but at the end It can all contribute to improve out literacy education.

           From all these essays, articles and in class discussion, I concluded that our most pressing literacy concern is that there are a certain amount of people who cannot access or take advantage of our technology to improve their literacy, and holding all of us back. 

The evolution of reading

When I first downloaded the two articles “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “America the Illiterate”, I thought ‘I don’t know what would be the connection between those two articles’. Is Google Making Us Stupid? is about how as we started getting information from online, the style of people’s reading and writing has changed, and he debates whether it is a good change or a bad one. According to him more people started to read writings on the Internet, and stopped reading paper books. As he said, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words (reading books and find information from them). Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski (Searching the information online, and he can get the information he was looking for without having to read a entire book, and etc).” One of people he describes on his article, Bruce Friedman, he even admits, “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print”. This reminds me of myself. When I was in elementary school reading was my favorite free-time activity. I went to the school library everyday after school, and read at least more than one book per day, but now I can hardly sit down and read a book without feeling tired.

I also agree with what Nietzsche said, “[Our] writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts”. People’s reading and writing habits has changed compare to older generation when we used to only read paper books, newspapers or etc. 

Hedges thinks the level of our future literacy is going down, because reading online is making our ability of reading decrease, but I do not necessarily agree. I think we read to observe information and other people’s thoughts and idea, like how I read online news articles to know current events, and use blogs to read other people’s writings. So even thought our generation reads online we can still expand intelligence. We are just doing it faster than people have ever been able to before.