The new literacy

Clive Thompson in Wired on the the "New Literacy." Thompson discusses the findings of Andrea Lunsford's Stanford Study of Writing  project, which suggests that "technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it - and pushing our literary in bold new directions." (another piece, in the Chronicle) The project found, among other things,  that young people in the web2.0 age are writing far more than any generation before them. The scholarly article "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy," assesses the findings of the first two years of the project, and argues that student writing is increasingly linked to the theories and practice of performance. That sounds plausible, even likely, given the nature of web2.0 as described by Lee Siegel and others: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."