Clive Thompson writes in Wired about what he calls “the New Literacy.” He describes a vast survey of student writing by researcher Andrea Lunsford.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.
Stewart Mader links to an interview of Professor Richard Florida at Newsweek about the increasing link between place and psychology.
Florida points out that industries in large cities have become far more specialized:
New York is great in fashion design and investment banking. San Francisco’s great in software. L.A.’s great in entertainment technology. And Nashville is the epicenter of music production. So if you want to pursue a given career, it’s not just that you can make it in any big city, because now there is a smaller number of big cities that will be the key places for you.