English 101 Final Portfolio Rubric

The main issue of the essay, “Digital communication in modern society,” is directly related to our writing and communication skills, which are what the English 101 course seeks to enhance. Through the course, I gained knowledge on how to gather information, evaluate it, and use it to back my position. In my essay, I maintain the position of using the social media as it has plenty of advantages and improves our communicative and writing proficiency.

To create my thesis, I conducted a wide research, but firstly I studied the Chapter 13 by Graff and Birkenstein, which played a key role in developing the main idea of my essay. These authors analyzed many sources supporting advantages and disadvantages of digital communication thus giving me enough information to take the stance. It is clear, that scrutinizing one source to support the thesis is not enough, so I had to gather and investigate the opinions of other authors, which in their works illustrated the positive impact of social media on communication. After passing English 101 course, I substantially improved my skills in organizing the ideas in a purposeful manner and formulated the views of supporters in a short review of the most significant advantages of digital communication in the first part of my essay.

From this course, I learned that it is necessary to brainstorm the opposite point of view, studying the naysayers’ opinions, in order to oppose the supporters’ arguments and create a vivid discussion to capture readers’ attention and communicate with them more efficiently and persuasively. In the second part of my essay, I investigated the ideas of those authors, who disagree with my thesis and consider digital communication as something adverse. For example, Kazmeyer in his article “Negative Effects of Technology on Communication” describes four main problems with online communication, which are the dehumanization, social isolation, omnipresent distraction and privacy issues, and these points definitely cannot be disregarded by believers and addicted users. Moreover, to support the discussion I included a couple of quotations and paraphrases highlighting both advantages and disadvantages.

In the third part of my essay, I touched the area of special interest for me - the impact of digital communication on writing skills of the students. The Pew Research Center conducted a profound research on how digital communication affects writing, which made a great contribution to support my thesis. In order to make this part more convincible, I included the ideas of naysayers, creating a small debate around the issue.

Many thanks to my professor, whose comments helped me to develop my own thoughts to their full potential and built the conclusion in the most proper way. I revised the introductory part as initially, it did not raise any questions, leaving the reader clueless about the subject of the essay and added my opinion on the issue, including a few sentences about what I am going to talk about in this essay. With the help of my instructor, I was able to structure and organize the essay in the most efficient and proper way, presenting the information on the issue more persuasively. After getting the peer review, I improved the prose of the essay “Digital communication in modern society” and revised the conclusions part, stressing more of my personal attitude and giving the answer to the thesis defending it most. After reading my essay, I realized that the objectives of the assignment were fulfilled and the thesis was supported with many quotations, reasons, and summaries, leaving no doubts that digital communication is a huge advancement of the humankind.

Sincerely yours, Youmee Lee

201312611

Professor

English 101

4 May 2017

Digital communication in modern society

Introduction

For the whole history of humans’ existence, people have been looking for the other persons to socialize and communicate with and even nowadays, that inherited trait of every single human on Earth still exists with a great demand of realization. The Internet network, which initially was created for the military purposes grew up and made a huge technological leap engrossing the whole planet giving abilities to communicate and share any kind of information worldwide. With the Internet advancement, came digital communication, which in less than two decades became an integral part of a life of more than 2 billion users. It has altered the way we perceive the term communication adding the feature of being able to access anyone instantaneously with a few keystrokes, which definitely makes person’s relations and interactions more advanced and brings our society to the higher levels of development. Graff and Birkenstein raised an issue on “whether the digital communication is good or bad - or both?” without giving the definite answer or point of view and just left the reader with supporters and naysayers’ ideas, but presented plenty of information for future discussions. In the first part of my essay, I will highlight the ideas to support my thesis, describing the pros of networking as it affects humans’ communication and behavior in real life. In the second part, the opponents of the idea will join the debate and I will touch the issue of not using social media as on the opposition’s opinions it kills our real-life interaction and privacy. In the third part, I will be discussing the writing skills of students affected by the Internet and prove the thesis with wide research.

The advantages of communication online

The influence of digital communication is highly individualistic that is why it cannot be considered as something hostile or favorable in general, but regarding it as humankind’s next evolutionary step is undeniably positive advancement. Using Internet makes possible communication over unlimited distances in a real time, sharing any kind of digital information to any place on Earth, making social relations, friendship and even business with people from the other parts of our planet, integrating communities who share the same ideas, distant education and plenty of other benefits. Laurel Storm admits such an important aspect of digital communication as the capability to reach the broader public, which for example makes harder for oppressive regime to keep control and easier to organize meetings and protests. Noa Gafni Slaney says, “Our online interactions influence our offline behavior”. Reaching broad public can grow into mass communication when people from all over the world unite on some common issue, and then create the page on Facebook or any other social network which could possibly be the foundation for the future organization. The vivid example is ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which was criticized by many people for making a focus on fun rather than donating to research, but it raised more than $115 million thus proving the effectiveness of mass communication using the Internet. Social networking sites spread news faster than any other medium leaving no chances to television, radio and press which provides every person with plenty of information right on the fingertips every second. Being able to instantly access any information in a few keystrokes gives favorable conditions for distanced learning and self-studying. According to the BBC Active, “student’s participation has greatly increased since the integration of social media with learning programs”. The most popular systems such as Moodle and Blackboard have portals and forums where students can easily access their lecturer with any question on the subject and have discussions with each other. Talking about the individual persons Zachary Fennel highlighted the advantage of digital communication for disabled people who are not capable of communicating in real life or just have low self-esteem to start any relations. Noa Gafni Slaney said that number one reason for the usage of social networks is connecting people together and socialization as “people who connect with others online are less likely to be socially isolated than their peers who don’t”. Nevertheless, having so many advantages digital communication possesses some drawbacks, which refuse many people from using it.

Why do people reject being online

The opposing group of humans who don’t see any advantages in using social media say that the lack of privacy, low level of information reliability, wasting of time and lack of socialization are the main faults and dangers. A person who lacks the real life communication and substitutes it with digital one loses ability to recognize non-verbal signs of others and has weaker ability to respond to body cues correctly. The study, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior shows that a group of children, which was not using social media for five days, scored better in reading facial emotions or other nonverbal cues than a group, which used their smartphones (Yalda et al. 7). Considering this fact along with other consequences of excessive digital communication, it possibly can lead to social isolation when a person replaces face-to-face interactions with much shallower connections online. Kazmeyer says that omnipresent distraction from social media significantly reduces person’s productivity and can be even dangerous causing for example car accidents. The primary concern for the significant part of the population remains their privacy in social networks, as everyone should share some amount of information about himself or herself in order to be recognized by friends. Information reliability also raises a list of objections for digital communication usage, as for that moment it is physically impossible to validate all the data flowing into the social networks.

Discussing influence on writing aspect

A lot of information is classified and free for preview any time and this fact definitely makes writing more focused and subject oriented, students become more involved in the assignment. I agree with Graff and Birkenstein saying that “technologies recycle any difficulties writers have reaching audience” as the person may be switching audiences until reaching those who respond with interest, but in my opinion, social media also significantly improves our writing skills. In survey on Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing more than 96% of participants agreed that “today’s digital tools having tangible, beneficial impacts on student writing” as they encourage greater collaboration among students and allow them sharing ideas among varied audience, while 78% voted that “digital technologies bolster students’ creativity and personal expression” (Kristen Purcell, Judy Buchanan and Linda Friedrich). From the other side, Chopra states that the Internet uses “new language” for communication, which is harmful to academic writing, especially proper grammar usage, and Graff and Birkenstein say that social media users forgot about formal academic writing language substituting it with “much like oral communication”.

Conclusions

Summarizing the statements about the impact of networking on real-life communication and writing, I can certainly say that all the cons are completely compensated by pros and online information sharing is a huge step forward for the whole humanity. Digital communication opened new possibilities for humans, broadening the globalization process, dismissing the distances and bringing the information management to a new level. Talking about writing skills, I agree that grammar usage and writing style sometimes become spoiled by excessive digital communication, but these can be improved with more careful attitude and extended learning programs. Social media has changed the way we used to communicate with each other, allowing to explore new horizons and have more social connections worldwide. However, there are issues with privacy protection, data reliability and socialization all the existing drawbacks can be minimized to an acceptable level using a system of healthy habits and responsible attitude towards private information.

Works cited

BBC Active. BBC Active Ideas and Resources. http://www.bbcactive.com, 2010, http://www.bbcactive.com/BBCActiveIdeasandResources/Howsocialmediaischangingeducation.aspx

Chopra, Karan. “The Effects of Social Media on How We Speak and Write”, Social Media Today, Sep. 17, 2013, http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/effects-social-media-how-we-speak-and-write. Accessed 05.01.2017.

Graff, Gerald and Cathy, Birkenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010. Print.

Fennel, Zachary. “What Are the Positive Impacts of Communication Technology” Techwalla, Mar. 31, 2015, https://www.techwalla.com/articles/what-are-the-positive-impacts-of-communication-technology. Accessed 05.01.2017.

Kazmeyer, Milton. “Negative Effects of Technology on Communication” Techwalla, Mar. 31, 2015, https://www.techwalla.com/articles/negative-effects-of-technology-on-communication Accessed 05.01.2017.

Purcell, Kristen, Buchanan, Judy and Friedrich Linda. “The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools” Pew Research Center, Internet and Tech, Jul. 16, 2013, http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/07/16/the-impact-of-digital-tools-on-student-writing-and-how-writing-is-taught-in-schools/ , Accessed 05.01.2017.

Slaney, Noa G. “Is Digital Connectedness Good or Bad for People” The New York Times, Nov. 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/11/28/is-digital-connectedness-good-or-bad-people.Accessed 05.01.2017.

Storm, Laurel. “Positive Effects of Technology on Communication” It Still Works, Mar. 22, 2015, http://itstillworks.com/positive-effects-technology-communication-1418.html. Accessed 05.01.2017

Yalda T. Uhlsa, Minas Michikyanb, Jordan Morrisc, Debra Garciad, b, Gary W. Smalle, Eleni Zgourouf, Patricia M. Greenfielda. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 39, pp. 387-392, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003227 , October 2014.