Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and student stamina. One is the expanding cultural bias in all writerly media toward clipped, hit-friendly brevity—no longer the soul of wit, but metric-driven pith in lieu of wit. Everywhere they turn, but particularly in mainstream, sophisticated venues—where middle-aged fogies desperately seek to stay ahead of the tech curve—young people hear, through the apotheosis of tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and sound bites as the core of communication, that short is always smarter and better than long, even though most everyone knows it’s usually dumber and worse.
Will the Book Survive Generation Text? - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via infoneer-pulse) (via teachingliteracy)
I generally agree with Romano’s points, but his rhetoric (his “eristic moves”) is so overblown and atavistic that I’m afraid this reads more like satire than a reasonable argument for the continued legitimacy of literacy.
