Many people argue that the increasing use of digital communication has a detrimental effect on the younger generation’s literacy. While I acknowledge the reasons for this thinking, I somewhat disagree with this notion due to the benefits it presents.
On the one hand, it is understandable why some people believe digital communication can do harm to youngsters’ reading and writing skills. The first reason for this is the increasing use of emojis and abbreviations. This is mainly due to getting accustomed to informal language by using it frequently. As a result, young people have reduced writing skills in formal writing,as they are familiar with informal ones, so they feel it is difficult to switch to proper grammar and spelling. It adversely affects academic and professional performance. Another reason is the limited access to diverse content. Because people often use the Internet to relax and entertain, they prefer to prioritize brevity videos. Based on this demand, all of the online content are short-form videos and they don’t have depth and quality. Consequently, younger generations have less access to a variety of complex sentence structures and diverse language use, which are essential to overall literacy.
On the other hand, I am convinced that digital communication can bring some benefits in learning reading and writing skills. The first reason relates to having an opportunity to access diverse materials. With the development of technology, teenagers can use digital devices like laptops, ipad or e-reader, which provide quick access to rich sources, to connect millions of books, newspapers, educational materials, researches, documents from online libraries. Therefore, learners can acquire knowledge and be exposed to various types of text, which is very helpful for them. In addition, the way of sharing and receiving feedback is an advantage. This is because online learning platforms, forums, facebook, instagram allow sharing of their writing and receiving feedback from others. It leads to improved writing skills and learning how to assess and evaluate on their own work and other’s work.
In conclusion, although online communication may have a bad effect on youth’s literacy, I still believe that it is more beneficial to them because it provides an array of opportunities for learning and interaction that traditional methods cannot offer.