Hello All! As I’m sure you have seen from my last couple posts I have spent a great deal of this quarter looking into social media and it’s various effects. In this post I want to steer away from social media’s effects on our social standards and focus a little more on how it effects our learning and even more, our writing.
Obviously the introduction of cellphones and laptops has drastically increased the amount of time I spend per day typing. Whether it’s sending a text, an email, or even updating some social media status, I seem to be constantly typing out my emotions. However, a recent class discussion spurred me to question whether or not these actions can actually be classified as “writing”.
While there is no doubt I am technically spelling words and forming sentences to convey a message, I personally believe something such as a text is much more similar to talking than writing. While writing requires us to engage our brain when considering proper sentence structure and other grammatical factors, technology allows us to mindlessly type exactly what we are thinking. Furthermore, I think that texting abbreviations/lingo are deteriorating my generations writing skills by allowing us to avoid forming full thoughts.
While technology and social media certainly have many positive effects on one’s education, I do not believe that the constant flow of “writing” we do all day actually qualifies as writing. Building off this, I actually believe it hinders our ability to convey full thoughts through words and form grammatically correct sentences.
