Steve Krause has a nice short piece on the fear of blogs which made me think of Ong's "The End of the Age of Literacy," which I wrote about on 6 Aug 2004. Among other claims made in the article to which provoked Steve's response is the claim that online communication like blogs are keeping students from learning how to "interact socially in the normal way through verbal communication'" [emphasis mine]. Writing is, apparently, bad for "normal" human development.

Steve notes that this rise in anti-blogishness seems to come largely from the medias most threatened by blogs. This is, of course, the history of media write large. I'm waiting for the day when blogs are used to decry some evil new communications technology as a threat to our literacy and our socialization.

blogging | blogs | digital literacy | Walter Ong | Walter J Ong | writing