The popularity of Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging has begun to have a troublesome effect on communications, based on my purely unscientific observations.

In the past few years, we have been reading about how the Millennial Generation has trouble problem solving and employing critical thinking, because since childhood they have used computer programs with pull down menus to guide them. Seems when that is your frame of reference, you have difficulty finding the answers to life’s little predicaments. No pull down menu, what to do?

Recently I have noticed the effect of the abbreviated form of communication used with Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging on communication in general. Have you noticed how emails have been becoming briefer and that apparently those sending emails are not consulting spell check? Punctuation? What is that? Grammar? Not important.

I must confess, I find myself not even capitalizing the first letter in a sentence when I am IMing, to say nothing of using any type of punctuation at the end of my IM messages. And I am not by any stretch of the imagination, anything but a member of the Veteran Generation.

When one is encouraged to be as brief as possible (in the case of Twitter, messages cannot exceed 140 characters and messages in Facebook are pretty much in that ballpark, possibly because most folks tend to use both sites), forming a longer sentence becomes daunting.

Young people prefer texting over a real conversation and that medium has a lexicon all its own. Abbreviations, symbols, numbers-it is like aliens have taken over the English language. I pride myself on never having texted in my life (although why, I have no idea). Probably my one last protest over the constant change technology has wrought. When you have the choice of emailing on a Blackberry or similar device or texting, I just can’t fathom why you would opt for texting.

We have one young friend who insists on texting rather than calling us on her cell phone, despite the fact that we don’t even have a texting out option on our cell phones and that was a conscious decision. I guess this young woman cannot conceive of a human being who is not similarly infatuated with texting and wouldn’t prefer it over picking up the instrument one is using to send the text and actually calling the person with whom one wishes to communicate.

After she has texted us, I always call her cell phone and she is invariably surprised to hear from me. Does she not realize it is a cell PHONE she is using? Back in the dark ages, people actually used them to talk to each other.

Think of what this abbreviated method of communication would have meant to the great authors. Hemingway would probably have loved it. Tolstoy, Cervantes and Shakespeare, not so much. War and Peace would probably have been a modest one hundred pages if written today.

Are we only a year or so away from mini-books, composed of 2000 characters? Is social media creating its own Haiku? Are we miniaturizing our language and our thoughts and concepts?

I fear there is only one step left…and that is communicating with symbols such as nautical flags.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 9:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.