Is Writing Changing?

Is writing changing..., writing is a living process, not dead like the Aztecs nor stagnant like a building. Writing is the process of weaving words together to form a complex or simple string of sentences that either tell a story or teach. The act of constructing such text is referred to as literature, man’s legacy. As a consequence of changes is the art of writing; as well as the mediums through which they or found and published, the way individuals read has changed. Now there’s the question of rather these changes have turned one of the greatest art forms into nothing more than a past time event, has the meaning of the words been lost, are reader no longer being enveloped by the stories they read?
In 1983 both a problem and a solution was
created. This date marks the creation of the Internet. In 1990 the World Wide Web or WWW as given life by Tim Berners-Lee, by the 2000s the internet had become an intricate part of the lives of millions. With the wide adoption of the internet came many things, for example, free music, online libraries & archives, and the death of both privacy and newsprint. With the internet came something new and glorious for researchers, what was born was a new and growing network of private and public archives that contained text from across the globe. This growing access to ancient text was a glorious turn of events of scholars; however, this access came at a premium. The materials were made available to the public through archival databases which charged the everyday person a couple thousand a year. These soaring prices made information very expensive and gave birth to a new form of theft: hacking and copyright infringement. Throughout history there has always been a price for knowledge & information, but never in the course of history has there been such a collection of information in one place. On the internet lies the confidential information of millions of individuals, company secrets, and archives of date. If a hacker was skilled enough to sift through all of the bullshit that lies on the web then that person would have access to information that in theory would bring about world peace, new technological advancements and increased efficiency of the criminal system. The prevailing problem with the internet is the fact that humans use it, and as a result, they embed their greed, lust, and other desires within it. The aspects of “research on technological change teaches us that the relationship between technology and society is never unidirectional. Rather technologies are often developed in response to the agendas of powerful social actors” (DiMaggio p.327).
Who directs, who? Are we the conductor or the actor? It would appear the Internet is not an instrument of the public but a private enterprise, controlled by the few to manipulate the many; however, its effect on literacy is minimal and is not fully to blame for the present lack of focus and critical thinking enabled people. The problem lies in two places: (1) the source, and (2) the social norm. It was the norm that every morning you would read the daily paper, but now we watch TV and get the same information, it was the norm that you would buy books at a book store, now we order them only and have them shipped or we simple read and e-book. It is the founding principle of technology to make life easier, but in doing so people give certain skills that they pose. When the textile industry was born people lost the ability to create clothes from scratch, the same is happening now with the internet but on a more global and rapid pace. The internet has made it easy to a lot of things that were previously more involved such as shopping, communicating, and reading. People believe that reading on the internet is somehow different from
reading a physical book, that all depends on the person reading that book. The author doesn’t change his/her style of writing to suit the internet, but it is the internet that creates readers of a less focused caliber. With the internet, readers can filter out works that they find to be uninteresting, too difficult, or that appears to be unwell received by its present readers. The internet created a new form of literacy, but it is also destroying one. It’s the fact of the matter that the internet created by itself a new language, what I am referring to is chat room language. The reason why people are weak in the critical reading skill is directly proportional to how much of their reading is done online. When people read online they form an initial opinion, then read to find evidence to support that opinion. The internet was born from a simple connection of computers, it grew to become the life blood of modern society by making things easier, such as communication, travel, technological development, and commerce. The internet gave rise to hackers, and a new form of literacy, but it is not to blame for the direction in which modern literacy is heading.
It can be said that we learn as we live, but what if we learn that it I acceptable to be lazy, weak, and indecisive?
With advances in technology, people grow lazier with every passing day. First came cars so we wouldn’t have to walk, then came phone so we would have to write, then came the computer so we don’t have to do calculations, then came the internet so know we don’t even have to leave our home, then came the cell phone now we don’t even have to talk to one another, and finally came the AI so now we don’t have to drive, remember our schedule, or even wake up at a time fashion for that matter. You can call technology a curse or a blessing it all depends on how lazy you want to be. But with it is not the fault of technology that we grew to be so lazy, no it is the lack of education to give something different to be more involved in. Education has tried to teach people the same thing for centuries and now wonder why things are different. In Letters to EJ a college professor writes about her growing disappointment in the quality of students in which she teaches. She goes to say, "I am dismayed by students' growing ignorance regarding sentence structure and other simple grammatical principles" (La Vista p. 9). La Vista writes about her dissatisfaction with English students of the day. Noting that with the emergence of the internet there has been a dip in both the quality and effort the students put forth. You can blame many things on the internet but a weak student is
always a teacher’s fault. A lecture taught three hundred years ago cannot be taught to a modern class and expect that they will respond to it the same way. English is a living language that is becoming more and more digitally based. The reason students lack knowledge of syntax and participial is since they don’t need them to function. Now day handwritten or printed work is ignored, this is what is leading to the death of the newsprint, and work is being turned in digitally. This shift in the submission of work has made plagiarism rampant as well as allowing students to simply use a program to fix the spelling, syntax, and diction mistakes. The internet isn’t killing literacy, it is the teacher over leniency on what is done online that is killing literacy. Now let’s look at writing, it is crude, brittle, and fluid. Writing is crude in that it reflects the writer, it is brittle in that has a creation of man it will be one day destroyed by man, and it is fluid it that it tells a story from its inception until its death. The true nature of matter writing is best described by Kenneth Goldsmith in The Writer As Meme Machine where he states “Imagine the writer as a meme machine, writing works with the intention for them to ripple rapidly across networks only to evaporate just as quickly as they appeared. Imagine a poetry that is vast, instantaneous, horizontal, globally distributed, paper thin, and, ultimately, disposable.” What Goldsmith is saying is that writing has become something as fleeting as the wind. Writers write to suit the moment not to suit the time or for their peace to survive the test of time. Writing nothing more than a sport to some, fighting for headlines and the spotlight. They aren’t aiming to make their works a testament of the times as Goldsmith, only a few are aiming for that. Writing in is old’s sense is dying, old school literacy is dead, but only time can tell rather or not the new successors to the art of writing will make this change desirable.
Has the internet killed the new paper, no but it has killed newsprint? The internet has to shift human life to the scream and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I would have written this paper in pencil if I could spell, but that just goes to show that the internet has taken certain skills from us just like the textile machine did so many years prior. The internet is not fully to blame for the changes in modern day literacy. The blame falls on the educators for not adapting to the effects the internet is having on students, the writers for overly simplifying their works at a time, further aid this declining literacy, and last the fault is the reader for placing an aver dependence on technology and not attempting to survive by their own wit.