An Idea For My Final Project

I’m fascinated by Carr’s idea that we’re drifting away from the book and the written word and moving more towards a life of hyperlinks, text messages, and tweets. We’re becoming more and more attached to the shortest of stories: that’s why we’ve seen an explosion of blogs, twitter users, instagrammers, and more. We’re continually gravitating towards taking in less at once. Now, our most popular websites are the ones that don’t even need to be written on. Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and others rarely, if ever, see a post of over 100 words. Now we are reduced to hashtags on pictures to communicate ideas that once required an essay’s worth of description.

I want to explore the decline of the written word. Not just from the book to the Internet, but from the height of literature to the 20th century, as well as from the introduction of computers until now. In addition, I also want to examine the way we write on the Internet and how that has changed. That is, how did we write on the Internet when we were first given the opportunity to do so, and how do we write on the Internet now? I like this tpoic for this assignment because it ties heavily into one of the central themes of The Shallows: that books are on the decline. I want to go beyond the fact that they’re on te decline, and try to find some sort of pattern or change in the way that we write.

I could see my thesis statement as something along the lines of: Although many subscribe to the myth that the Internet cannot change how we write, trends in book length, book content, and style indicate indicate that human writing is on a path to becoming simpler and simpler as it becomes more and more available to all members of the population.

I’m thinking that there will be three main segments to my paper- early book vs. recent book, book vs. internet, and early internet vs. modern internet. How has language changed during the history of the book, and the history of the internet? I imagine I’ll start off my paper with a recap of the history of the printed word, and a recap of the history of the digital word. Then, perhaps, I can look at how the recent intertwined nature of the two has started to alter the history of the word in each medium.  Each of my three segments would begin with one of these “recap” sections, and then I can move towards a larger discussion of the written word and its alteration throughout history. I’d like to try and find clear, defined points in history where our way of writing changes in either style, content, or length, or some other factor. I hope I can base my discussion on instances like this, global literary shifts. Finding some examples like this will aid my thesis because my entire thesis is based on the idea that there are clear, defined trends in writing. Finding these “turning points” in history will hopefully allow me to elaborate on how that one particular point sparked a much larger trend in the way people wrote.

Right now I’m not sure what other kinds of details I will be able to add into this piece, but  I feel comfortable with the direction that my topic is taking. If anyone would like to take my idea and maybe elaborate on some of my talking points, give me an idea on what else I can add into my paper, it would be much appreciated!

-Ben