Today, September 8th, is International Literacy Day and of course when it comes to literacy there is a lot to be thinking about these days.  I recently expressed concern about literacy when I wrote about Reading Rainbow being canceled last week. And of course, people are often questioning the internet and the role it’s playing in young folk’s literacy.

Well, on this note, Wired has a great article up that claims we are in a new age of literacy, that all theonline  social networking happening is actually causing kids to write more:

“The first thing she [Andrea Lunsford, head of study] 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.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.”

The article goes on to make the point that more than just writing a lot, young people are writing well, that they are learning how to write to achieve what they want and to successfully get their point across.

While this is encouraging I can’t help but think that all this interneting (which I clearly do a lot of) can’t be just positive.  While I think there is something awesome about the way Twitter forces the tweeter to think of creative way to get their point across in 140 characters, it also is addictive and people spend more time on their Twitter than talking with people in real life or delving into another facet of literacy, reading. Sitting with a book can take patience and the immediacy of the internet and social networking might just be killing our patience and ability to sit for an hour or two with a book.

But of course the internet definitely isn’t going anywhere so I suppose it is a good thing that studies show that it isn’t hurting young people’s ability to write - because if it was, we’d be in big trouble.

*photo by wickenden (CC)