New Media and Academic Writing

In the past, my experiences with “academic” writing have been fairly good. I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly decent writer. These experiences have also been very formal. I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about, and present facts in a professional way. New media is completely different from this. Thanks to Facebook and instant messaging, writing in the twenty-first century has become much more similar to a casual conversation. We get used to typing to our friends and using informal language and even abbreviations. We shorten entire phrases into two or three letters.
Examples like this would be completely absurd if used in “academic” writing. I think they have started to creep into academic writing though. I constantly find myself shortening words or not capitalizing other words. I usually catch my mistakes and correct them, but just the fact that they happen in the first place shows a negative affect that new media may have on academic writing. Besides making our writing more casual, new media may also detract from important facts of our history. If we are bombarded by videos and music and Internet lingo, it must detract from what we could be learning about Shakespeare or the Gold Rush.
I do, however, find many benefits in incorporating new media into the English curriculum. First of all, if something is constantly surrounding us, it is a part of our culture, and thus, is important. I think that in order to understand anything from our past, we must first fully understand ourselves and why we are the way we are. New media also brings powerful tools to the English table. Thanks to new media we can communicate across the globe with other English enthusiasts or publish our ideas to the web for all to see.
New media being incorporated into the English curriculum truly is a touchy subject. Some may see it as a degradation of all that we’ve learned from English in the past, while others see it as the only path to our future. Either way, I believe that new media is here to stay and is a great method of learning for our generation.