Writing, technology, and teenagers

Writing, Technology and Teens, a report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, is in the news today, in reports that emphasize teenagers' use of "informal elements" such as emoticons and messaging shorthand in their schoolwork. (The sky is falling.) I liked reading these student comments though, on page 16 of the report:

I like handwriting. I don't know, I feel more organized writing by hand especially with outlines and drafts and stuff.

I find it hard to think creatively when I am typing so I like to handwrite everything then I put it on the computer.

I type so much faster than I write. But if I want to make a paper much better I have to type it out first, then hand write in the changes, then type the good copy. And it makes it easier to think things through if I can handwrite it. And I think my worst work is when I just type it and don't handwrite it.

I'd want to see greater care with punctuation in these statements (gathered, it seems, in focus groups), but I'm cheered to see these young writers thinking about the ways their tools affect their work.

More: 93% of teenagers surveyed report doing writing out of school. 72% of teenagers usually do personal writing by hand.

A general Pew concern is that teenagers do not regard instant messaging and e-mailing as what the report calls "real writing":

The act of exchanging e-mails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.

The kids seem to be thinking clearly here. "Real writing" for them would be analog: on paper, in an institutional context, writing that gets a grade or seeks access to an opportunity (a college-application essay, for instance). Texting a friend or family member is a different proposition. U shd c soma my txt messgs to my kids.

When the conventions of "real writing" and the conventions of digital informality collide, the result is a mess, as in e-mails to professors that say

hey i mnissed class cd you mail me the homework thanks

Which is why I wrote How to e-mail a professor. As this college semester nears its end, that post accounts for 20% of recent visits to Orange Crate Art. That's also cheering news, a sign that many students have come to understand that the conventions of "real writing" have analog and digital lives.

Some related posts
"[I]n my own hand, in my own notebook" (Robert Fitzgerald)
On handwriting and typing (W.H. Auden)
Writing by hand

Colson Whitehead, "Visible Man"

I know some folks feel bitter about me, as bitter as the first dandelion greens of the season. Yet these people are not without hope, hope that is drizzled on those dandelion greens like a dash of sweet pomegranate vinegar. Do they begrudge the scorpion its sting, or the duck its quack? How can I be other than what I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He's Black?

From a wickedly satiric Ellison-influenced commentary on these times by novelist Colson Whitehead. Read it all: Visible Man (New York Times).

Related post
Yes, they can

Bean, an OS X word-processor

Bean, James Hoover's free word-processor for Mac, gets better and better. Version 1.1.0 became available a few days ago. Among recent additions and improvements to the program: a full-screen mode which allows for distraction-free writing.

Bean is small and fast, like this sentence. And like the last bowl of porridge in the old story, Bean is just right, at least for many word-processing tasks. The program offers more options than TextEdit, fewer than iWork's Pages. It is not a behemoth, not a Microsoft Word replacement.

Bean is released under the GNU General Public License. (It's free!) You can read more and download the program here: Bean.

[Above, the Bean icon, designed by Laurent Baumann.]

Meme (123)

My blogging friend Lee has tagged me with this meme:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Here's what I've found:

Products began to offer something more, something magical, something that could only be achieved at the press of a button. Indeed, of the terms used by people in the Populuxe era to describe their remarkable time — "the jet age," "the space age," "the atomic age" — "the push-button age" seems the most comprehensive and evocative, the one that embraces the miracles and the menace of the time.

There was a tremendous proliferation of push buttons on products during the 1950s and well into the 1960s.

Thomas Hine, Populuxe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2007)

Yes, there was. My family's first car (or the first one I know about), a Plymouth, had a push-button transmission.

Ben, Elaine, Jason, Joe, Sara: you're it.

Malcolm X on prison and college

I don't think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in a prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day?

From The Autobiography of Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 183

["Boola Boola" is the Yale fight song, words and music by Allan M. Hirsch (Yale '01).]

Bad metaphor of the day

From Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, proffering an explanation of Barack Obama's appeal among college students:

"What I find amazing, particularly because our students are brighter than ever — and it doesn't matter whether it's Penn or La Salle or any school — but the students go and sorta drink the Kool-Aid of a wonderful speech."

On this metaphor's terms, Barack Obama is Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples (sic) Temple, and those listening to his speeches are blind followers, duped by a cult leader to participate in their own destruction. (Though it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, that was mixed with cyanide for the 1978 Jonestown murder-suicides.)

Of course, Governor Rendell, like J. Alfred Prufrock's lady friend, might object: "'That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.'” Like James Carville speaking of Judas, Rendell is using a metaphor. But metaphors have meanings and implications. One can disavow a metaphor upon realizing its meanings and implications. But one cannot rely upon a metaphor to make a point while disavowing its meanings and implications.

Condescending and insulting and grotesque as it is, the Kool-Aid metaphor is also revealing: if Governor Rendell has to reach for a metaphor of cult leadership and blind followers, he plainly fails to understand the thoughtful interest and effort that the Obama campaign has inspired among many young adults. Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you Mister Rendell?

Here's the short clip of Rendell talking with college students: On drinking the Kool-Aid. Major props to the young woman in glasses, willing to argue with the gov.

["Something is happening here": à la "Ballad of a Thin Man," with apologies to Bob Dylan and Mister Jones.]

Related reading
All metaphor posts (via Pinboard)

Bad analogy of the day

An editorial on college-campus parking problems compares faculty and students to waiters and customers at a restaurant. If waiters park right in front of a restaurant, customers will not want to park at a distance and patronize the establishment. The context is different, the editorial acknowledges, but the roles of faculty and students, the editorial contends, are "close to the same."

Faculty : students :: waiters : customers?

That's the kind of analogy that develops when one begins to think of higher education as a matter of customer service. Is it worth pointing out the ways in which this analogy fails? I think so.

A campus building is not a customer destination, and a campus is by definition a pedestrian environment. One doesn't drive to class as one might drive to a restaurant. One drives to campus, and then gets around on foot (and perhaps by shuttle-bus). That a student should expect a space in front of a classroom building — a building that during any hour of the day might hold a thousand students — is silly (handicapped parking aside).

And parking aside, faculty are hardly comparable to waiters in their work. If we profs were waiters, we'd have a pretty strange restaurant, serving our specialties to diners who in many cases have no idea what's on the menu, though they've already paid for their meals.

Related post
"Customer service" in higher education

Blondie minus Blondie

I think it's an improvement, though I'm not sure it will work on a regular basis.

In this instance, with Daisy on hand, subtracting Blondie turns the strip into Garfield with Garfield's thought balloons removed: Daisy becomes Garfield (take that, Garfield), and Dagwood becomes Jon, speaking blandly to no one. Subtracting Blondie makes clear how little genuine communication there is between Bumsteads: here, as in so many strips, Blondie functions as the silent audience for Dagwood's "observational comedy." Let her go out and live her life, says I.

Subtracting Blondie also calls attention to the waste land in which Dagwood struggles. That wall: is it a wall, or is it empty space? That piece of furniture: very like a coffin. And those speech balloons: it took a lot of work to get them looking semi-right with Blondie out of the picture.

Related posts
Garfield minus Garfield
Telephone exchange names on screen ("Dagwood Rumstad")
Thoughtless

Boredom and attention

Wally: So I mean, is that our problem? Is that what you're saying? Are we just like bored, spoiled children who've been lying in the bathtub all day, playing with their plastic duck, and now they're thinking, What can I do?

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, screenplay for My Dinner with André (New York: Grove, 1981), 91

*

Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them. Until one starts to collect them, insects and minerals are not very appealing. Nor are most people until we find out about their lives and thoughts. Running marathons or climbing mountains, the game of bridge or Racine's dramas are rather boring except to those who have invested enough attention to realize their intricate complexity. As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action — physical, mental, or emotional — is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 128

[The back cover of Finding Flow notes that the name Csikszentmihalyi is pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high."]

Related posts
Flow
Powders, pencils, mountains, cigars
"[T]races of ourselves"

Calling Bandi

News from the UK:

A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.

Experts say the inescapable farmland smell permeating London will stick around for a couple of days.

Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.

"The word for fertilizer": is that an innocent slogan, or a joke that Bandini's customers would have caught? (Think of another word for "fertilizer.") Either way, this smell calls for a persuasive product spokescharacter to explain it away. It's time for Bandi.

[Image from a 1959 matchbook cover, found in Warren Dotz and Masud Husain's Meet Mr. Product (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003).]

Related post
The real Mr. T