Award-winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson will explore how prose, poetry and creativity will make or break the English language in the digital age at our meeting on Saturday, September 16. Join us at 2:00 p.m. at the Four Points by Sheraton, 5115 Hopyard Road, Pleasanton, for this thought-provoking presentation. In his presentation, “A Threat Past the Pages: The Future of Reading and Writing in the Digital Age.” Anderson will discuss the danger of our youngest generations learning linguistic impulses through hyper-abbreviated platforms like Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. He’ll consider what happens to the brain’s ability to focus when we trade a book’s imaginative doorway for the swamp of fragmented, multi-media distractions. He’ll also look at the future of the written word if today’s writers, poets, artists and teachers don’t recognize a threat against it.
For more than a decade Anderson has worked as a crime, culture and travel journalist, writing in the center of a media metamorphosis that continues to alter how Americans share their everyday experiences.
Scott Thomas Anderson is a staff writer for the Sacramento News & Review. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Future Travel and The Irish Independent, Dublin’s largest daily newspaper. He’s been interviewed about homicide investigations nationally on the Travel Channel and internationally on Ireland’s Radio 1:Drivetime. His nonfiction book, Shadow People: How Meth-driven Crime is Eating at the Heart of Rural America, is an exploration of nation’s modern methamphetamine crisis. In 2015 his newest nonfiction book was released, The Cutting Four-piece: crime and tragedy in an era of prison overcrowding. To learn more about Anderson, visit his website.