This Generation Majors In Brevity: Technology Poetry

Social Networking has directly effected education. Students at our school district missed their bus the first day of school because they were “texting” their friends while standing ten feet away. On a field trip talking on the bus was minimal because most were “texting” their friends and parents on and off the bus. Sex-texting with photos and cyber-bullying are now disciplinary issues making their way into Student Handbooks under the discipline code. Student’s don’t swear anymore they text OMG!

Gone are the days of Dickens and thick books, lengthy essays, or traditional short stories. Facebook limits texts to 420 characters, Twitter to approx. 140, and most texts even shorter, so the rule of thumb is creating excellently written “topic sentences” that are concise, to the point, and brief. There is no room for extra verbiage any more.

Communication today majors in “conciseness”.  I would like to call it “technology poetry”. In poetry every word matters, even every syllable. One word can carry an image, a symbol, the essence and meaning of life. To be an effective social networker, one needs to know vocabulary, both technical and nontechnical.  Using the right word to give the concise meaning with brevity is becoming a new art of writing. 

So the next time you see your teenage daughter “tweeting” her friends with links about her tattooed boyfriend, smile, she’s a 21^st Century talented writer, writing in an age of conciseness and brevity.

This was a guest post by Anthony Bachman. He is a public school teacher at Spring Grove Area School District in Spring Grove Pennsylvania. Anthony also writes a blog on christian topics called Five Revealed.

Comments

[Clint]

Allow me to keep this brief:
lol omg that's my 02 l8tr.
...I'm not even sure what I just said...

[Bill Leachman]

Great post. I would like to know your opinion on if you think students should be disciplined for posting things about their teachers on Facebook. I recently read an article about a student being suspended because of posting things about the teacher on Facebook. Not saying it is right, but when I was in school, we didn't have Facebook to post things about teachers, we just talked about them in our group, so in the age of social media, should this be a disciplinary action? I can understand if death threats or posts that the teacher was threated with physical harm, but just posts that you do not like the teacher, should a student be punished for that?

[rolex day date]

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