The Internet, Chatrooms, and Writing

With the rise of the Internet as a social tool, the concept of learning how to read and write in order to communicate is becoming far more vital to the social life of the average American citizen. And yet, despite this need to write legibly to get your ideas across, some people that go online to chat with friends, family, or complete strangers have still resisted mastering basic grammatical and spelling skills that should have been necessary for them to learn long ago.

I have been using the Internet as a social tool for many years now. I can still remember going into my first "chatroom," extremely nervous about what others would think of me, resigning myself to talk perfectly so that other people would have a high opinion of me, and then having that idea fall apart as I encountered swarms of people that were perfectly content to talk in some form of writing that was almost entirely made up us mis-spellings, abbreviations, and the substitutions of some letters with numbers. This utter disregard for the ways that the English language is supposed to be used left me shaking my head, and wondering how it could have possibly happened, with most Internet communication demanding that one type correctly in order to be understood.

Unfortunately, although I have been thinking about this conundrum for a long time, I still haven't been able to come up with an answer. But whatever is causing the average online user to shed his or her basic English skills, the trend is spreading. More and more essays for classes, on tests, and even on state exams have been turned in with typical Internet abbreviations such as "LOL" "WTF" "LMAO" and "OMGWTFIDKBBQ" written on them. The sheer disconnect from the poor students that attempt to do such a thing and what is actually expected of them to know as educated persons stuns and kind of dismays me. Of course, this trend does not seem to be fading away; rather, acclaimed young adult publications such as "Going Bovine" have these abbreviations written in the book, furthering popularizing through the author's stupidity these glaring defects upon what proper writing or talking should be. Or maybe I'm just being too stuck up about the idea of online cultures mingling with scholastic cultures. Well, I have to admit that IDK if this is a bad thing, and I still don't know what causes it... I wonder if I will ever know.