Monthly Archive for August, 2009

“‘I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,’ she says. For Andrea Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

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. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.” [via / via]

We, as youth, are a potentially potent form of opposition and social change. The culture industry has thrived for a strong 70 years, but I strongly believe that with our generation’s force and resistance against the treatment of our lives as a commodity there will, over time, be a stronger social change hopefully leading to a necessary political transformation. The artist was once regarded as a radar for future social forecasting, this is just one reason why we believe community to be so important and stress this within our events for if we don’t have each other then what do we have to become inspired by and believe in? Sure there are legends of the past such as Laurie Anderson or for some, Madonna, but we will never understand the context in which they rose and a simulation would only result in, well, a simulation. Hitting up backyard shows and DIY spots all over the country there’s overwhelming evidence to support a proliferating concept and movement. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to lead up to, but sit down for a moment and just think about your time and space. No matter what the answer is for you, how fucking lucky are we to be here?

Liars – Read The Book That Wrote Itself
Animal Collective – College