Today anyone can be a writer; anyone can set up a blog on the internet or
write something thoughtful in their Instagram feed as a description of their newest
“mirror-selfie”. And if that is longer than 4 lines, the writer thanks the readers for
reading the whole thing. According to the website hostingtribunal.com out of 1.7
billion websites in the world there are more than 500 million blogs. About 2 Million
Blog posts are written every day. Sharing messages and information became easier
and faster and with the process, messages became shorter.
One could think through the expansion of digital and social media, reading and
writing have become less and less important. But I think it is the other way around.
Today people are constantly on their phones texting their friends, reading tweets and
messages and checking the news-feed. People are constantly reading and writing.
The perception of what writing or a text is has simply shifted. With the process of
digitalization, texts became more and more multimodal. Magazines and newspapers
have more pictures and any information presented on a webpage is also emphasized
with pictures. Texts in videos are emphasized with music and music is emphasized
with videos: probably because people are so used to being triggered by more modes,
than just regular written texts. But it also means people need the competence to filter
out the important information and to make sense of more different types of texts.
The Gen Z and Gen Y are used to and encounter mostly very short texts in
their day-to-day life: Text-Messages, Tweets, description of pictures, comments. Also
within seconds, anyone can obtain any information they want and they want it
concise. The information is often presented, summarized and simplified, for example
in a YouTube video. Which also means it can never contain all the information there
is and it should be kept in mind, it is always filtered through the person who’s talking,
including their opinion and intention. So the competence to critically reflect on what is
written or said is indispensable.
Writing and reading are still omnipresent in day-to-day life in the 21st century but
it has changed and developed over the years. Multiliteracies are important to make
sense of all the different types of texts that you encounter every second and to create
such texts to get your reader’s attention.
-Barbara
Works Cited
How Many Blogs Are There? We Counted Them All!. (n.d.)
https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/how-many-blogs/#gref
Dear Barbara, I really enjoyed reading your blog post! You made your point clear by providing background information and examples. The title was quite catchy, and I was not at all disappointed when I read it. I can totally agree on the statement you presented as a title of your blog entry after reading your text. What I think could be improved is the reference to the EFL classroom or at least to the teaching aspect in general. You could simply add it at the end of your entry. This would make the blog post perfect in my opinion 🙂