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For years, academics, educators and all manner of pontificating pundits have been bemoaning the downfall of intelligence at the hands of technology. The use and over-use of television created, to hear them tell it, passive, stupid children, and thus the name “boob tube”. Video games are blamed for producing violent, fat, under-achieving students. The cell phone inspired panic as it was believed to bring about--at first-- too much talking and brain damage, and now, god-awful texting, that “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness.” And the Internet, ushering in that demon, Facebook, is viewed by many as the brain-eater of all brain-eaters—making our kids lazy communicators whose brains are de-evolving from over-stimulation and useless chatter. But does the Internet really kill the developing brains of our children? Does the increasing use of the Internet--- surfing, social media, and all of the other technological activities we so hate to love—make our kids poorer students? Specifically, does it really make them bad readers and writers?
I have a particular interest in this question because I am a bibliophile and a writer. So although I, of course, want my kids to do well in school, I want them more than anything to love reading and writing as much as I do. I know that I, myself, am constantly connected to the Internet. I am modeling an above-average utilization of this medium by the mere fact that I start my day on the computer and invariably end it that way. So I worry that I may be influencing my kids to be imbalanced with their computer usage in a way that proves to be detrimental. On the other hand, I know that the more you read and write, the better you are at it. It seems to me that the ways we are using our computers are, fundamentally, reading and writing. To test this theory, I watched how my kids used their computers this week to see what they were doing and where they were going online.
I found that my 10-year-old, with his sports site surfing and YouTube networking, was doing more reading and communicating through text than he was passively watching. My high schooler, who spends much more time on her iPhone than her laptop, was constantly texting and talking; watching movie trailers and sending and receiving pictures. She mostly uses her laptop for school work and Facebook. The college kids, whom I couldn’t observe and had to ask, said they did basically the same activities as the high schooler, except they visited news and gossip sites and read blogs (mostly celebrities’, like Kanye West’s, uber-popular sites).
The fact that, when it comes down to it, my kids are mostly reading and writing online can’t be all bad. To be sure, what is being written online is rarely perfect prose. And I am not always happy with the quality of the information my 10-year-old is taking in from the Internet. But then, I wasn’t always happy with my kid’s reading choices before the Internet. My older son read all of those Goosebumps books when he was around 10! Is the online stuff for kids any worse than that? I don’t think so! Anne Trubeck, at intelligentlife.com has also observed this propensity for writing and reading online:
I would hazard that with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home Internet access,we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.
According to research, Anne and I are right. The Internet is making us all better writers. In fact, Andrea Lunsford, Stanford University writing and rhetoric professor believes that “we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” Professor Lunsford’s study, the Stanford Study of Writing, looked at 14,672 student writing samples from 2001 to 2006, to examine this very question—is student writing better or worse off for all of the online technological shortcuts? The study has uncovered some interesting and exciting discoveries. According to Professor Lunsford:
Today’s young people write more than any other generation in history. Thanks to social
