If there’s any line in Clive Thompson’s article in last month’s Wired that jumps out at me, it’s “online media are pushing literacy into cool directions.”  I like it for its reservation.  Timid optimism. Thompson seems to really want to shout it on the mountain: New Literacy is Born! But he settles for a cool “cool” instead. Bugger. 

The skinny:

Pitting Andrea Lunsford against the Johnny-Can’t-Reads of the world, the selling point, based on Lunsford ‘s research, is that online contexts of communication are making students more sensitive to audience and timeliness, i.e. students report that good prose “has an effect on the world.”

OK, that’s a starting point, a “cool direction,” if you will, but can we scale texts, tweets, and social media comments up, as Thompson and so many academics are wont to do, to game-changer status?

Hmmm…

Public message boards (any YouTube video comment section will do) almost instantly become cesspools of vitriol and ire, with flamers feeding trolls and trolls keeping the torches lit. The intellectually engaged (and grammatically aware) folks in these open-ended communities tend to be drowned out. And I have grave doubts that anyone is ever persuaded about anything in these spaces, unless persuasion now means writing a comment about a comment that was a comment to a video that was commentary to being with. Cicero would've been so proud. In private spheres such as Facebook, most people communicate with fewer than 10 other people, even if they have hundreds of friends. And these are folks with whom they more than likely have a real friendship. Spurring to action? Effect on the world? Sounds like a stacked deck to me.

There is one point Thompson makes that I’m all for: “thebrevity of texting and status updating” teaches kids to be poetically terser. If they do it all the time, yeah, it probably does. The only thing they need to be un-taught is that they can’t always use this approach. Not when they want to get through school or write a Victorian novel. After that, when they return to the real world, no one has time for the ink-fishing and bloating that we force upon them every chance we get. “500 grammatically correct words and appropriately punctuated sentences on the approved paper format, Johnny, or you get a lower grade.” What does Johnny do? Of course! He knows how to write for his audience!

We just won’t tell him that because we know it’ll jeopardize our authority.