NetDynam 2.0

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It seems to me a response, my response, to be found relevant, will come about, as-it-were, in the eye of the beholder.

Alternately, a response is relevant simply because it was evoked by the ‘ecology’ given by the thread.

Whether your reader is following your thread may or may not be ascertained from this same reader’s responses.

My own opinion is: you may have evidence that I wasn’t following your comments, but, at the same time, you may be ignoring evidence that my responses are following your comments.

Of course, this depends what ‘follow’ means. This also points in the direction of a question about what certain evidence is, where it concerns the fact of a response following from a comment.

Actually, I’d be interested in how ‘following’ is ascertained as a matter of analysis of language. It seems to me ‘following’ as a tangible aspect, marked as it would be by references back to the/a comment would be ascertainable to some degree. But, this would not then provide certain evidence that the comment was or was not being followed in the wider, sense of what the respondent actually was following.

Also, I assume the suspicion one’s comment is not being followed in the narrow sense given by analysis of references, etc., means—sort of—that absence of references at least means the response doesn’t follow.

Which is to suggest: the writer cannot know whether their writing is being followed, unless a response indicates the writing is being followed. However, this seems to imply also that the writer’s attitude about being followed, if there is no such indication, would realistically be agnostic about the fact of being followed, or not followed.

This problem also penetrates the affectual domain, since it is common enough that unrelated responses or lack of responses may lead the writer to feeling ignored.

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write—and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

excerpt
Clive Thompson on the New Literacy
By Clive Thompson 08.24.09
Wired Magazine