“Too Short For Words” by Aaron Chaboki
The English language is being subjected to adolescence and their compulsive habits of instant messaging and texting. Social networks and unlimited phone plans have arbitrarily deterred literacy among modern youth. At least, that is the preconizing notion that has managed to deluge concerned parents and librarians into conceiving that today’s teenagers are heading towards the lowest literacy rates of any preceding modern generation. Construing this misconception with slang terms and language’s natural evolution over time, critics today do not seem to hold any foundation as support to understand the informal pose of instant messaging on social networks or conversing by text.
The truth is that literacy has not produced much change in the public educational system. English is the same tedious, punctual, and conservative structure it has been for decades, but technology is under a constant change and ingenuity. New forms of technological communication are utilized on a regular basis, and this application brings forth new forms of socializing because of the necessity to adapt to any modern technology. Texting and instant messaging is not a virus infecting the future to come, but transference to a paradigm shift. Teenagers in high school have developed a social compulsivity. They will text during class or check their phone obsessively, and teachers congregate this habit with the fact that literacy is in a scrutiny because it is perceived by them as evidence, but when looked into, these claims are unveiled to be circumstantial or incidental.
Instant messaging and texting is ‘condemning’ today’s youth because it is supposed that it conforms students to undesirable reading and writing habits, and because of its low level of formability it damages student’s capability to write formally and to use regular structures. This stance or point of view on the matter, however, manages to lack any account of modern research on language evolution, psycholinguistics, and multiple literacy development. This overwhelming concern that has managed to overlay modern communicative society is based on assertion of faulty nature. This is a reoccurring stigma of every generation’s distaste of every subsequent generation’s modernized use of slang, and intrapersonal interaction from the consistent usage of social networking, text in email, and phones.
No matter how ostracizing American’s modernized youth may seem from their behavior, it is a solidarity that stems from habitual use of the medial form of communication that teenagers use day in and day out. Texting in the modern manner of acronyms and inanities such as LOL(Laugh out loud) or LOLz does not prevent any capability of learning advance literary skills. In fact, this is somewhat of a subsidiary because it engages the person to interact with people and the English language. The format used when texting, emailing, or social networking forces people to change their formality because of the various interactions that result from this subsidiary.
Ultimately, teenagers are interacting with the English language and people more often and in various manners. Although it is sometimes in a peculiarly unique formality, it is a factor that is beneficial for society because it allows such a vast type of social communication. Any prejudices someone may have towards these forms of communication have a tendency to come from their unfamiliarity with newer terminologies, and lacks to understand that language at its core is a form of communication. The English language is not necessarily punctual, and grammatical, but it is a form of communication that has evolved and adapted to the many styles of communication that are present in today’s society and culture.