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How Does Technology Impact Young Adults' Writing Habits?
At the Pew Internet and American Life Project, we recently published a report titled Writing, Technology and Teens, which considered the impact of informal writing styles, as commonly found in the infinite number of shorthand conversations young people have each day over text messaging and IM. The primary question we wanted to answer with this research was if these informal writing styles, which make liberal use of writing shortcuts such as acronyms (e.g., LOL, ROFL, BRB, etc.); abbreviations (e.g., "cu2nite", meaning "see you tonight"); and emoticons, such as the recently-turned-10-years-old smiley face, had any effects on teens’ more formal writing, such as what was required from them in a school environment.
As Nicole recently wrote, the results from this research reveal that while most teens do not consider these forms of interaction as "writing," the habits developed in quick messaging conversations do bleed into their more formal, school-based writing. Since I considered the communication habits of college students for my master’s thesis work, I thought it might be interesting to look at the questions posed in our teens’ research in light of my data on a slightly older crowd. Below is a cross-post that I have also published on Pew’s website; the original post can be found here.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Spring 2008 Editor's Note
Last December, with the release of the Fall 2007 issue of gnovis, I wrote “[though] these papers are somewhat disparate in topic, there is nonetheless much that they have in common: a vitality of purpose (…), a commitment to interdisciplinary rigor and ambition, and a distinct awareness of the relationship between the present and the past.” The same sentiment holds true for this Spring 2008 issue, as well, and I am pleased to say that I believe this is our strongest issue yet, thanks both to the increasing quality . . .
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What's in a name? That who we call a king by any other name would rule as supreme
Abstract: The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon brought Pakistan to attention in global news due to its strategic geo-political position. The United States' resolve to av
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The Pleasure of Death: The Construction of Masculine Citizenship in Military Recruitment Ads
Abstract: Through a psychoanalytic reading of visual and emotional appeals, this essay discusses the rhetorical devices employed in the National Guard's 2007 military recruitment advertisement-Three D
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wants moar: visual media's use of text in LOLcats and silent film
Abstract: Visual media has a history of using text to both frame and augment an audience's understanding of visual content. This paper compares the recent LOLcat Internet phenomenon with intertitles
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An Uncertain Text: Reliving Shakespeare's Creative Milieu in the Modern World
Abstract: The production of online texts, especially within wikis, is far more similar to the creative processes of the Elizabethan stage than printed texts. Because Shakespeare continued to re-work
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Seeing the Specter: A Gothic Metaphor of Subjectivity, Popular Culture, and Consumerism
Abstract: Due to their very nature, some societal forces are invisible to common perception. Using the work of Foucault and Baudrillard, this essay develops a theory of “the Specter” — an invisible co
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The Aura of Decay: The Concept of the Book in the Age of Hybridity
Abstract: The following paper takes up the tradition of aphoristic writing in order to examine the concept of the book and the image of the palimpsest in the age of hybridity. The digitization of cul
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"Big T, little t" – Thoughts on Technology Skills in Technology Studies
Here in Georgetown’s Communication, Culture and Technology (CCT) program, the students have informally divided themselves into CCT ("CC-Big-T") and CCt ("CC-little-t"). The implication, for the benefit of outside readers, is that some of us, the little-t’s, while comfortable working with theories of technology, are not comfortable working with technology itself. There is, without trivializing a very important term, a digital divide in our midst.
Category: The Gnovis Blog