Why Social Media is Killing Literacy
- Sep 11, 2014
- 3 min read
Twitterheads who defend the social media platform as promoting literacy acquaint it to writing poetry. Now if their tweet was in iambic pentameter I might consider it a valid argument or a Haiku of some sorts, but most tweets are more akin to verbal graffiti than Ezra Pound or T.S. Elliot.
True, it does force you condense your thoughts to a 140 characters and write in a different way than you would normally, but too often people replace ‘and’ with + or ten with 10, or the one that sends me into uncontrollable spasms, ‘you’ with ‘u’, just to save a few previous characters.
The thing about writing is that there’s a certain creativity that gets lost in Twitter. You don’t craft a tweet or a Facebook post for its beauty. They are attention grabbers, telling you to click here, pretty please.
The George Orwell of Social Platforms
Margret Attwood, in particular, has said she believes Twitter and social media promotes literacy and believes reading has increased because of it. She believes that social media gets more people thinking about wriitng, even it it's just a single sentence.
It is too early to study conclusively what Twitter and Facebook are doing to literacy – if they have any impact at all in the long term. Facebook reaches its 10 year anniversary this year and Twitter is reaching its 8-year existence, but in my humble opinion readers and writers aren't better off. It forces us to compete in this weird, online rat race that has become more competative than ever before. Anything that is outside the normal '10 great things about social media' list post is immediately disgarded. The arbitary rules these social networks make dictate how we write and stifle creativity.
What would George Orwell think if he was alive today? With all the netspeak, he would possibly be horrified at how the English language has progressed
Twitter Vs Everyday Speak
One author, who wrote an entire book on the subject, has looked at word usage from Twitter and compared it with the Oxford English Corpus, which studies everyday word usage and he found that there was very little difference. He studied the top 100 words used from each and found they were remarkably similar. He also found that there were only two internet words in Twitter’s top 100; ‘rt’ which stands for Retweet and my mortal enemy ‘u’ which, of course, stands for you.
But can we look solely at vocabulary as the determining factor for the effect on literacy? Facebook, the largest social network , has over a billion users. Twitter has over 270 million active users and those users send out 500 million Tweets a day. In the next 2 years, the number of words written on Twitter will be greater than the number of all the books in the world. It would be ridiculous to think this doesn’t have an effect on how we read and our attention span.
The cheerleaders for social media point to the fact that social media forces people to read more, even if it’s a friend describing what they had for lunch.
SAT Scores and Dog Walking
According to a Washington Post article, SAT reading scores in 2012 hit a four decade low. Students were unable to answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar. Experts suggest that it is because more people are taking the 4-hour test, especially those from low-income families, but where does social media come in? Social media has become the dominate factor in many of our lives. I'm sure there are many causes but certainly the low SAT scores can be partially blamed on how much time we spend on Facebook and Twitter.
According to Bloomberg, we spend more time on social media than we do pet care. We spend an average of 40 minutes checking our Facebook feeds and only an average of 39 minutes walking our dog.
Conclusion
Social media is very good for a lot of things. It's good for making new friends. It's good for promoting a person or certain products. But despite what all these marketing gurus say about writing for social media, it doesn't promote picking up a good book or even a good article or blog post.
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