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Comment by Dove | Hacker News Reader

I find it curious that more than one of them predicted a decrease in literacy. Indeed, the opposite seems to have happened.

When I was in college, my English professor vowed that he would make us better writers by forcing us to write an essay every single night. And it really worked.

Yet we live in a world where people are writing, constantly writing, in a way my English teacher could barely have dreamed of. High school kids, debating endlessly with a hostile audience every day, are turning into frighteningly persuasive writers all on their own.

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People thought that TV & radio would take off, both media that don't require literacy to use/consume/watch. However the internet means everone has to read AND write in order to interact. People have to be able to string words together. People have to be able to write to have friendly.

Computers have probably done lots for literacy.

You can see it a little bit now when much older people who don't use computers a lot, write things. They aren't very literate, probably because they haven't written as much as young people have.

The issue here is that the population is very different. Some of the worst schools literally graduated people that were unable to read their own diplomas. Some give great education. I'd say literacy did not decrease, and access to information greatly improved. But if you wanted, you also could find a lot of illiterate people and a lot of ignoramuses, I would even argue it is easier to be an ignoramus now than before.

I can see however where that came from - with the rise of the TV culture and not seeing the following rise of the internet and global information connectedness brought by it - you can easily decide that the future is couch potatoes watching TV, not couch potatoes reading blogs and writing comments :)

High school kids, debating endlessly with a hostile audience every day, are turning into frighteningly persuasive writers all on their own.

u jelly brah?

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