Comment by wj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wj | Hacker News Reader

Like others I do not feel as if I understand the question and feel as if the question could have been phrased better by a better writer.

Do I think writing is important? Yes. I automatically disqualify a job candidate if their writing is poor.

Do I think writing skills have gone down? Yes. However this did not happen recently. I noticed it in 1997-1998 as my younger brother's generation starting to spend more time using instant messaging on the computer than they were doing their homework.

Do my views represent society at large? I am afraid they do not. I am continually flabbergasted by the comments that I see on YouTube and on news websites. In my opinion either schools are failing us or society is. Either way it has become clear that people are rewarded in the communities they deem important by being confrontational and derogatory without formulating and conveying a proper argument.

Youtube comments are written by people who would, in previous times, barely ever have written anything for general consumption. I'm not sure if the impression that everything was better in the past isn't a serious observation bias.

After all, with the advent of first SMS, then messenger platforms, the average teenager is probably using the written word a few magnitudes more often than the generation that grew up in, say, the 1990s. If you go further back, maybe young people still wrote letters. But there was definitely a gap of at least a decade or two where writing was strictly reserved for unpleasant things. Sure, they're using various shortcuts, emojis, slang, and not enough capitalisation. But it's hard not to see most of that as a rather creative adaptation of language to new mediums.

What has changed is the audience that people with rather strange views can now command. I'm not even talking about youtube celebrities or 'twitter thought leaders'; just your average Joe from Sacramento who thinks it's high times these lying journalists get stomped to ground. He's now writing that down, and maybe 10 people read it, and he reads 10 similar things about jews/scientists/the CIA virus to start the next civil war etc. Where before, your opinions were regularly brought back into something like a mainstream consensus, you can now find approval for almost anything, if you just try.

Let's see how that ends...

Do you find the Socratic method can grate on the reader if overused? I know I certainly feel that way.

Does the number of rhetorical questions you ask in a day indicate how much of a bad day it is?

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