Hedges vs. Thompson

  Hedges likes to get us riled up. In our next installment of his beliefs, he reinforces some aforementioned concepts such as life in a “post-literate world,” one where knowledge spreads through images rather than printed writing, while also presenting more statistics to make us cringe, the validity of which is rather questionable. “Nearly all reporting—I would guess at least 80 percent—is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole” (Hedges, Bad Days for Newsrooms). As a man who publishes his work with the motivation of degrading non-print media, he is far too biased to make a fair statistic I can accept, regardless of how insignificant his claims are, because Hedges has gone a little too far in his unfaltering ideology, and I am hesitant to accept much of what he says because it’s so sensationalized. If print journalists must rely on tactics like his to sell periodicals, perhaps the death of the newspaper will benefit American society by weeding out the crazies who work only to make themselves sound prophetic and aware of societal disasters before they strike.
  Clive Thompson holds opposing views, ones which are admittedly along the same lines as my beliefs. His article is optimistic and refreshing, using actual professionally-examined analyses of the writings of kids these days. The technological revolution, he claims, is resulting in an effect akin to a writing renaissance. Students who spend hours a day on Facebook aren’t just wasting time; they are learning to better understand the notion of adapting ones writing to the target audience, an enormously helpful skill essential to provocative writing.