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"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.   These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.   "In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.   Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.

Email, videos of cats falling over, frivolous list-based websites—there’s no-denying that the Internet has given us some pretty wonderful things. However, all this awesomeness comes at a cost, and that cost is the destruction of our minds, sanity, and social lives. That’s right: For all the good it’s done, the Internet has the potential to make us very miserable, very angry, or very dead.

10 Email Is Addictive (Just Like Gambling)

The trouble is, email follows something called the “variable interval reinforcement schedule,” which is the same process that drives gambling addiction. In both cases, you perform an action (check your email or put a coin in the machine) in the hopes of receiving a reward (an interesting email or a whole lotta money). But that reward only comes at unpredictable times—causing you to perform the first action more and more frequently. It’s one of the strongest habit-training methods known to man, and nearly everyone who owns a computer has been subjected to it for years. 

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field. "I think it has," says Joel Postman, author of "SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate," who has taught Fortune 500 companies how to use social networking. The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work. "It would say to me ... 'well, this person doesn't think very clearly, and they're not very good at analyzing complex subjects, and they're not very good at expressing themselves, or at worse, they can't spell, they can't punctuate,' " he says.

Back in the day there was this book entitled “Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.” It was published in 1988 and was written by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Moi liked the concept, some others, not so much. “Cultural Literacy” is defined by Education. Com: Having sufficient common knowledge, i.e., educational background, experiences, basic skills, and training, to function competently in a given society (the greater the level of comprehension of the given society’s habits, attitudes, history, etc., the higher the level of cultural literacy)

Middle school students who frequently use “tech-speak”—omitting letters to shorten words and using homophone symbols, such as @ for “at” or 2nite for “tonight”—performed worse on a test of basic grammar, according to a new study in New Media & Society.

Drew P. Cingel, a doctoral candidate in media, technology, and society at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., conducted the experiment when he was an undergraduate with the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State University in University Park, Pa. under director S. Shyam Sundar. The researchers surveyed 228 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in central Pennsylvania on their daily habits, including the number of texts they sent and received, their attitudes about texting, and their other activities during the day, such as watching television or reading for pleasure. The researchers then assessed the students using 22 questions adapted from a 9th-grade grammar test to include only topics taught by 6th grade, including verb/noun agreement, use of correct tense, homophones, possessives, apostrophes, comma usage, punctuation, and capitalization.

This study attempts to establish whether changes in digital literacy, through a period of five years, are age-dependent or the result of experience with technology. The study is based on empirical findings from two independent studies of Eshet-Alkalai & Amichai-Hamburger (2004), which investigated digital literacy skills among different age groups, and of Eshet-Alkalai and Chajut (2009), which investigated changes over time in these digital literacy skills among the same participants five years later. In order to distinguish between the age-related and the experience-related factors, the present study reports on findings from control groups of a similar age and demographic background, which were tested with tasks similar to Eshet-Alkalai & Chajut (2009). Results show two major patterns of change over time: (1) closing the gap between younger and older participants in tasks that emphasize experience and technical control (photo-visual and branching tasks); (2) widening the gap between younger and older participants in tasks that emphasize creativity and critical thinking (reproduction and information tasks). Based on the results from the control groups, we suggest that experience with technology, and not age-dependent cognitive development, accounts for the observed life-long changes in digital literacy skills. Results, especially the sharp decrease in information skills, suggest that the ability to find information or use digital environments does not guarantee an educated or smart use of digital environments. (Contains 1 figure.)

are our schools meeting this demand? In short, no. Or at least, not well enough. As a country we have devoted many resources to early childhood education initiatives that teach children to read. But once students possess these basic skills, they must be taught to interpret the information they read, to think critically, to write clearly, and to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, middle and high school students are not meeting state and national standards for basic reading proficiency, let alone developing higher literacy skills. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 38% of twelfth graders read at or above the proficient level.

Promoting adolescent literacy cannot be limited to reading and writing. To be highly literate in our culture involves mastering many different types of literacy- digital, financial, health, media, etc. If a student graduates high school able to read and write, but is unable to use a computer, we would consider their functional literacy limited. Yes, this is an oversimplification, but it serves to illustrate this point: literacy is defined and influenced by cultural and societal standards. And in a consumerist society such as ours, our jobs dictate many of those standards. These jobs demand digital literacy.

Some social critics are of the opinion that the spread of the electronic media is destroying literacy. Standardized test scores of reading and writing ability have in fact gone down in recent years. Are the new media the main cause?

the number of hours spent watching television declines as the education levels of viewers rise, but education-related differences in the amount of television use are not large and they have been narrowing

Volti notes that Marshall McLuhan was of the opinion that television affected viewers by requiring they use all their senses, that viewing television was not like reading, which is linear. Television is less concerned with sequence than reading.

Cyber slang is suspected of damaging students’ writing acumen. Cyber slang is a term used to describe shortcuts, alternative words, or even symbols used to convey thoughts in an electronic document. Because so many digital media limit the number of characters an author can use at a time, students are becoming more creative to get the most out of their limited space. Common cyber-slang terms that have made their way into popular speech include BFF (best friends forever), LOL (laugh out loud) and WTF (what the ____).

“I think it makes sense for these social conversations to be lightweight or light-hearted in terms of the syntax,” said President of Dictionary.com Shravan Goli. “But ultimately, in the world of business and in the world they will live in, in terms of their jobs and professional lives, students will need good, solid reading and writing skills.

The Times Daily newspaper cites a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life Project, "Writing, Technology and Teens," which found that the cell phone text-based abbreviated communications teens use are showing up in more formal writing.

Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest. Maybe too used to it, in fact. This handy function seems to make adolescent users faster, but less accurate, when responding to a battery of cognitive tests, according to research published in 2009 in the journal Bioelectromagnetics.

A study led by researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain surveyed a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds about their texting habits, then asked them to write a sample text in the lab. The scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none

The ready availability of search engines is changing the way we use our memories, reported psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University in a study published in Science last year. When people expect to have future access to information, Sparrow wrote, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” It’s good to know where to find the information you need—but decades of cognitive science research shows that skills like critical thinking and problem-solving can be developed only in the context of factual knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to have knowledge stored in your head, not just in your computer.