“Facebook presents far more danger than the cultivation of lowercase first-person ‘i’s and emoticons :). The real threat posed by Facebook is not that it ruins writers’ ability to punctuate or encourages them to replace words with pictures. The problem with Facebook is that it nurtures one of writing teachers’ greatest foes — the teenage fantasy that writers write only to themselves and to those who are just like them.”
—An essay by Wheaton College Professor Lisa Lebduska on “The Facebook Mirror” at Inside Higher Ed.
One response
I felt this article was one big sweeping generality and that a strong case could be made for exactly the opposite position: that Facebook has the potential to widen your pool of friends so that everyone ISN’T a mirror of you.
Whether it lends itself to the collapse of literary excellence in students is also sort of a silly argument. Excellent students will write well on facebook. Students who write poorly on facebook probably wouldn’t write their thoughts down at all if not for this easy-to-use media.
For my money, emoticons and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) are doing more damage to written communication than Facebook. LOL 🙂
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