I was reflecting on this the other day. How do we communicate now? What are the key features of how we communicate that were not available before. Maybe it's the combination of the following. 1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips). 2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write). 3. Concurrent (multiple communication going…
On you first two points, I agree. I don't think the effect of the Internet on reading and writing can be exaggerated. Pre-Internet, the only writing I ever did was when encouraged by parents (such as to penpals I didn't really want anyway) or for schoolwork. I suspect this would have been true for most. And written English was a more formal mode of the language that barely reflected day to day conversations at all. N…
After the Internet went mainstream, for the first time in history, large number of people write every day, people who wouldn't have, in comparable social station, have written in the past. Who wrote in the past? Pupils, students, lawyers and some other professionals. Most, would have stopped writing prose after finishing school or university. Moreover, very few would have written voluntarily, only as part of a job, or as part of education. For the majority of the population, all voluntary, fun, hedonic communication (in the narrow, everyday sense) was spoken. This is now very different.
I used to think that writing makes us smarter (because it asks us to think carefully, to look at the writing from many perspectives, to try and produce truth, since writing is preserved and likely seen by others), and so had high hopes for humanity ...
... then came Twitter ... and I realised that it's not writing as such that has these effects, but rather social expectations (as for example embodied in the career structure of scientists) in concert with writing that account for those positive effects.