Upon completion of Deborah Brandt’s piece Sponsors of Literacy, a few lines resonated with me in context to Dwayne Lowery’s situation: “Dwayne Lowery experienced profound changes in forms of union-based literacy not only between his father’s time and his but between the time he joined the union and the time he left it, twenty-odd years later. This phenomenon is what makes today’s
literacy feel so advanced and, at the same time, so destabilized” (Brandt 178). I feel as if I have already experienced literature trends change on a much more rapid level, yet still synonymous to Lowery’s phenomenon. The most immediate example I can think of is social media. Social media started out with longer posts on MySpace–which sounds ancient now–and Facebook, but has been cut down to much shorter posts. These posts come through the most popular forms of media now, being Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter. All of the aforementioned typically range from one sentence posts to a maximum of a few lines. When I was still in my childhood, I never read any literature that was so limited in word count, but things have advanced at a rapid pace. Now, this may not be as detrimental to me as it was for Lowery in his case, but the absurdity that I have already seen such a quick change in literacy is stunning to me. And who knows, this trend of rapid literature advancement may be beneficial to society, or it could destabilize things even more, such as in Lowery’s condition.
Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165–185. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358929.
I find that the change in literacy on social media platforms is really interesting, and as you’ve stated, occurring at a rapid pace. There are so many sites who have transformed themselves into more short-form versions of what they used to be. Facebook, for example, while always having been popular for short posts and simply informing people of minor occurrences, has become barren in terms of long posts. While once there would have been long-form posts informing family members and other’s in one’s community about updates, now such posts are circulated and popularized less often. I have noticed this difference as well, though I think that although Twitter has capitalized on the short-form method gaining popularity, it has also allowed for longer posts on its site. In the end, I wonder what it will mean, if long-form sites will make a comeback, and if they do, how long it will be until then.