Did Pencils Make Us Dumber?

from the moral-panics-through-the-ages dept

We've talked about the popularity of moral panics for any new kind of technology, and shown how various reports of new technologies somehow being "bad" are almost always unfounded and over exaggerated. Claims of pretty much every modern technology somehow making us dumber are almost never supported by the facts, but still, you get people just trying to drum up book sales telling us that Google makes us dumber by encouraging people not to read as much -- when actual evidence shows people are reading more long-form works.

It appears there's a recent book out, A Better Pencil, by Dennis Baron, that explores how these same fears and totally unsubstantiated moral panics seem to have come about with pretty much every new communications platform out there. Baron recently did an interview with Salon, where he pointed out that these same sorts of fears go back all the way to Plato:

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

So, forgive me for being skeptical about each new fear about each new communications technology that comes about. For all the cries of "but this time, it's different," it's the same exact story we've seen pretty much throughout history. The technology makes it easier to communicate, and those who benefited from the older restrictions get most afraid of what the new technologies allow. Often, it just seems to be a fear that there will be more competition and more innovation, and the old-timers are afraid they're not equipped or able to keep up.

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Even More Research: Technology Is Making Kids Better Writers, Not Worse

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

Every few months or so, we read about some freaked out reporter/columnist/pundit/politician complaining about how the internet and texting are destroying kids' ability to write. Yet, pretty much every study on the subject has found the opposite to be true. Study after study after study after study after study have all found that kids today are better writers than in the past.

Clive Thompson writes about even more research on the subject, talking to a professor who suggests that, rather than "the death of writing" this is a renaissance:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization."

That's because people are constantly writing. Almost all of this communication actually involves writing. In the past, outside of school -- or certain job functions, many people barely wrote at all. And, yes, kids use txt spk at times, but every generation changes and morphs the language. But, more importantly, kids are smart enough to know what's appropriate when in most cases:

Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

But there's also an interesting philosophical shift that he highlights. Since the type of writing and the audience is different than in the past, many younger people today approach writing in a different manner, and even have rethought what they consider to be good writing:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

This is really fascinating when you think about it. Historically, many people haven't been that concerned about their writing, because it didn't matter. But, the more it matters, the more seriously they take it. This certainly doesn't mean that everyone has become a good writer -- far from it (just view any open comment forum). But, when people really care about what they're saying, they tend to get better at it, and the internet gives more people more reasons to care. As for all the bad writing out there? It's not a sign of the destruction of written English. Those people probably wouldn't be writing much at all without the internet. So it's actually a step up, relatively, from what they would have been doing in an alternate internetless universe.

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What's Wrong With Paying Homage To A Literary Classic By Writing A Sequel?

from the trying-to-figure-it-out dept

Against Monopoly points us to a NY Times article that discusses some of the recent "controversies" over unauthorized sequels/prequels/re-imaginings of certain classic books, including the ban on an unauthorized "sequel" to Catcher in the Rye -- as well as the awesome addition of zombies to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, now known as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But the key point is made towards the end:

Yet the urge to write sequels and prequels is almost always an homage of sorts. We don't want more of books we hate. The books that get re-written and re-imagined are beloved. We don't want them ever to be over. We pay them the great compliment of imagining that they're almost real: that there must be more to the story, and that characters we know so well -- Elizabeth Bennet, for one, or Sherlock Holmes, who has probably inspired more sequels than any other fictional being -- must have more to their lives. In a couple of quite good sequels recently -- "A Slight Trick of the Mind," by Mitch Cullin, and "Final Solution: A Story of Detection," by Michael Chabon -- we even get to watch Holmes grow old and discover love of a sort.

Certain books are more than mere texts -- words on a page or, these days, an electronic reading device. They're part of our mental furniture. And yet it's their familiarity, their well-wornness, that makes them such tempting targets. If zombies were to turn up, for example, in Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford," it wouldn't be nearly so funny.

And, then when you think about it, if copyright is designed to encourage more creativity, wouldn't these sorts of re-imaginings of already existing fictional worlds fit that criteria exactly?

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Opening Up Your Entire Writing Process Isn't Such A Ridiculous Idea

from the not-that-everyone-has-to-do-it... dept

Last week, when we wrote about how author Stephenie Meyer seemed to be overreacting to the leak of her latest manuscript, one of our regular critical commenters (an IP lawyer, who fully supports the IP system) posted a mocking comment pretending to mimic us by saying that maybe she should have opened up her whole writing process and put it up as a wiki. Of course, we never suggested any such thing, we merely pointed out that once the reality of the leak had happened, there were good and bad ways to react to it, and she chose a bad way, that punished her biggest fans.

However, it's worth noting that the more wide open process of creativity isn't necessarily worth mocking either. In fact, Boing Boing points out that Wired Magazine has opened up its storyboarding process for a feature for the next issue, so that people can follow the process of building the story. The mocking commenter-type folks would insist that this would somehow hurt the magazine and the writer by somehow "revealing" the process too soon, but the reality is that it's likely to help build more interest in the story by better connecting with fans who will feel a bigger connection to the story by seeing the whole process, rather than just the finished product.

Of course, this isn't to say that everyone has to embrace such an open process, but that it's not such a ridiculous process, no matter how much it may offend the sensibilities (or billing ability) of an IP attorney.

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