By Dulce Hernandez
University of California researchers have found that advanced technology and social media have changed the fundamentals of how writers write and how writing is evolving—in college, in the workplace, and in the community.
“With the rise of social media, rather than reading blogs, individuals are often writing without carefully consuming or considering other written material,” said Karen Lunsford, a UC Santa Barbara Writing Program professor and one of three lead researchers in the Wayfinding Project.
“With the rise of social media, rather than reading blogs, individuals are often writing without carefully consuming or considering other written material.” — Karen Lunsford, writing professor and researcher, UC Santa Barbara
Lunsford was speaking at a recent virtual event to discuss this cross-campus UC research collaboration that examines the “writing lives” of UC students who graduated from 3 - 10 years ago.
Lunsford of UCSB has been working with colleagues Carl Whithaus at UC Davis and Jonathan Alexander at UC Irvine for the past three years to track the experience of individuals through their writing activities since their college graduation and find how writing has influenced their paths.
"According to Deborah Brandt's Rise of Writing, in our media-dominated cultural landscape writing has overtaken reading as the skill that defines literacy,” Lunsford explained. “As researchers, we are interested in how this shift in importance is playing out for our alumni."
Carl Withaus is a Wayfinding researcher and professor of Writing and Rhetoric at UC Davis.
The Wayfinding Project has been gathering data from surveys and group interviews of UC alumni participants and last July published its first report, "Affect and Wayfinding in Writing after College.” The article, published in the academic journal College English, examines emotion and affect as important dimensions of wayfinding in writing.
The results were based on data collected during a year-long pilot study, in which the researchers surveyed 225 undergraduate students from various UC campuses and conducted in-depth focus group interviews with about 20 participants. “Our goal is to get our participants to reflect on their writing and determine how writing defines their careers in the future,” Lunsford said.
To discuss their study, Wayfinding researchers hosted four virtual events during the fall on different aspects of writing research, including the ways to study writing, the evolution of writing, and the research outcomes. The 4-event symposium was supported by a grant from the UC Irvine Humanities Center and the sessions were primarily attended by writing teachers and researchers.
The data demonstrate that emotional engagement builds the self-definition and identity of the postgraduates as writers. But, as Wayfinding researchers continued to analyze both the survey and the focus group responses, they couldn’t help but notice the impact of media and technologies, particularly the effects of increased social media posting, texting, email communications, and blogs on writing.
“With the new and improved use of social media, we hope to see the extent to which participants are rhetorically agile,” Lunsford said. “How do they compose content that may simultaneously affect both their personal and professional lives, for example. And what does it mean, as professionals, to navigate an information overload?”
Jonathan Alexander is a Wayfinding researcher and professor of English and Informatics at UC Irvine.
In its most recent research, the Wayfinding Project team has found that social media has heavily impacted public perception of every aspect of writing and that we tend to want to share all our memories and personal experiences online. Still, despite all the resources and technology accessible to more people than ever, many of us find it challenging to engage with written work that is not our own.
Next, the Wayfinding researchers of will be working together to observe the effects of the gig economy on writing and on careers that depend on writing. And they will be testing their theories in advance of releasing the next phase of their study later this spring.
Dulce Hernandez is a fourth year sociology major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Writing Program course Journalism for Web and Social Media.