This little essay by philosopher Charlie Huenemann (Utah State University) is quite important, and everyone should read it and share it (longtime readers will know I don't say that very often!). Some excerpts and some comments:
The internet broadens the public square, and allows many more people to participate in the exchange of ideas (or, failing that, memes). This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, more participation means a more vibrant and eclectic breeding ground for culture: more diversity, more creativity, more involvement, and more communication, which are all good things. On the other hand, the “moremoremore” tends to drive shorter attention spans and shallower content.
It is simply false, as the whole Internet demonstrates, that "more participation means a more vibrant and eclectic breeding ground for culture": all culture worth the time depends on exclusion, judgment, and screening. Most people have nothing to say that is worth hearing (vide Twitter again!), which is why the Internet is an unmitigated disaster for culture, even if prior intermediaries were often deficient along many dimensions. Despite that normative disagreement, I agree fully with Professor Huenemann's next observation:
The emblem of both results is Twitter: each day of Twittering would fill up a 10 million page book. Each tweet is limited to only 280 characters, but that has proven to be ample, as the average tweet is only 33 characters (so I learn from a quick Google search). A great many of our social media posts feature a central image, and the verbal component is an accessory or a punchline. Emails are beginning to represent the epic works of popular culture, by contrast – so much text, so few images! – but obviously they are not much to brag about in terms of thoughtfulness, for the most part.
All in all, writing matters less. To my old school way of thinking, this means thinking and reading also matter less. I once heard Jonathan Bennett opine that there are no purely stylistic difficulties; every problem in expression betokens a failure to have thought all the way through what one wants to say. If we are more lax in our expectations for our writing and the writing of others, this means expecting less in thinking and reading. Good writing is mental discipline, and that discipline carries over, or fails to carry over, into all attempts to process content.
Do read the rest about the ramifications of all this for our jobs as teachers, including of writing.
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