Although it may seem otherwise, people care a lot about language. Everyday people who mash words together without a second thought will get all defensive and downright purist when the discussion turns to proper use of English, especially if there’s some perceived threat. And a big threat to language has been looming: digital technology.
The premise is this: Digital tools are ruining a whole generation’s ability to write and communicate clearly. Terminator gave us an overt myth of technology destroying humanity, but, really, technology’s destructive effects will be subtler: We’ll just keep dumbing things down until we’re no longer able to communicate, and that will be the end of the good world as we know it. Cognitive goo will ensue. (Nicholas Carr presented a more nuanced view of this in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” [1])
These screenagers, digital natives, millenials, however they are dubbed, are certainly fluent with digital tools in ways that befuddle us. I can’t keep up with the iPod versions. Kids use cell phones not so much to figure out where they are going but where they are. They are mean and thoughtless to each other (and us) in ways unique to the quasi-anonymity and remove of cyberspace. I have to admit, at times I find it all pretty annoying too.
But when I look past the way students of the digital age use these tools, when I look through their sometimes troubling socialization through screens, I see they are writing, certainly more than we ever did, and I see a lot of good in that.
These kids are composing in imaginative ways most of us couldn’t conceive of when we were young. Their ability not just to write but to compose using mixtures of text and images and sound are astounding.
You may grant that these kids are composing online in unprecedented ways but still think that the basic use of correct language is withering: Sure, they can whip up a PowerPoint or mashup some media, but they can’t diagram a sentence or even spell correctly, right?
Well, many studies discount this thinking, including one in the journal Literacy [2]that concluded “children’s knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for preteen children.”
I read a great New York Times article about the reading side of this issue, titled appropriately: “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” [3] What struck me was the article’s description of the frustration e-writing engenders: “…writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents.” I love this line, because to many people, the phrase “cryptic argot” is itself a kind of “cryptic [4]argot [5]” (yes, “argot” is linked here to its definition; just in case, “cryptic” is too).
Some may cry foul here, pointing out that people should know words that are in the New York Times, for god’s sake, but the reality is lots of smart people don’t. The Times has a discourse for its readers. Kids’ digital “cryptic argot” is not a primitive form of language, but language use that fits their discourse community, their audience: Peers. And they have been downright ingenious with this ability from the start.
We might also worry that they will be unable to code shift, to turn those textual shortcuts into the standard written English all of us used so well in the good ol’ days. But as someone who teaches college students in online and hybrid writing courses, I’m just not seeing it. These students expertly and easily shift from their texting grammar to standard grammar, as fluently as we shifted when we were young from talking to mom and dad to our coded language for our pals.
Of course they do. The above-mentioned Literacy study authors, in thinking through their findings, said, “…the enthusiasm for textisms, for the playful use of language that enables creating a variety of graphic forms of the same word, is highly related to the kinds of skills that enable scoring well on standard English language attainment measures.” They have grown up constantly playing with language!
A while ago Phillip Elmer-Dewitt [6] looked at the conversations on a then-budding Internet. Sometimes terse. Occasionally mean. Often stupid. But he also saw a world of opportunity and a chance for generations of writers to be born: “But it would be a mistake to dismiss the computer-message boards or to underestimate the effect a lifetime of dashing off E-mail will have on a generation of young writers. The computer networks may not be Brook Farm or the Globe Theatre, but they do represent, for millions of people, a living, breathing life of letters. One suspects that the Bard himself, confronted with the Internet, might have dived right in and never logged off.”
A generation gap in language and literacy has always existed (remember, some crazy guy named Plato was suspicious as writing itself was emerging, saying it only offered the “semblance” of wisdom). Kids sitting up on devices all night sexting and cyberbullying each other. Not good. But don’t confuse these issues with those of language use and technology. The former are problems of a more fundamental sort: Watching what it is our kids are doing, and guiding them when they are in environments where they interact with others. That’s much different than worrying about their dwindling ability to use a comma properly in a school essay.
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[9]Scott Warnock [10]
[9]Latest posts by Scott Warnock (Posts [11])
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