Internet will improve reading, writing, smarts?

by David Safier

A short article based on an unscientific survey of internet "experts and users" concluded that the internet will improve reading and writing skills, and make us smarter to boot.

Take the survey for what it's worth, which is very little, but I think there's something to its conclusions.

When people understand writing is about communication, they become better writers. When all they do is "write for the teacher," lots of students don't make the connection between writing and saying something they want to say. Email, Facebook and Twitter have all increased people's buy-in to writing as communication. They write because they have something to say, even if it's just a few words, even if it's non-grammatical and filled with abbreviations which are unintelligible to the uninitiated.

I will gladly take poor spellers and punctuators who are trying to say something over students who say nothing without any errors. You can improve students' mechanics easier than you can teach them the essence of writing, which is making written words on a piece of paper or a computer screen say something. Once students get that idea, they're on the road to becoming better writers than they were before.

(What if we taught children to walk by putting them on treadmills, but in the real world, they never walked? They always rode everywhere or were carried. Would they become proficient walkers who then became eager skippers and jumpers and runners and dancers? In a sense, only writing school assignments is like walking on a treadmill. You may learn the basic skills, but you know you're not getting anywhere, so why should you care?)

Reading, though not exactly the same, is similar. People who want to understand what they're reading will read better. The internet is filled with things regular people find interesting even if teachers don't, and people who read items which interest them, just because they want to, just for the glorious hell of it, grasp the essential purpose of reading. When you read in school, reluctantly, the only purpose for reading is to do well on the test. That's not enough for many people to invest real cognitive effort into the process of reading, and it's sure not enough to make them pick up reading matter in their free time.

Will the internet make us smarter? It depends what you mean by "smarter.". Today's IQ scores in the U.S. are higher than they have ever been. There are lots of reasons, but one is that more people are part of a literate society today than they were 50 to 100 years ago. If smarts are something we can measure, we're smarter today, and the internet should help continue that trend by increasing our use of reading and writing skills.

And if the internet brings more opportunities for literacy to parts of the world where literacy is not easily available, many people living in those areas are going to learn to read and write better, and, in the "book smart" sense, they'll be smarter as well.

Educators tend to disparage every new technological innovation, often because they're generals who are still fighting "when I was a boy/girl" educational battles. More often than not, increased technology increases educational possibilities as well.