oh noez! lol cats iz corrupting our youths!

You know, every time I open up a newspaper and see an article about technology and adolescents it is always lamenting how netspeak and text messages are going to ruin our youth. These articles are accompanied by the obligatory list of "translations" of the kids’ mystifying lingo to help clue in the puzzled adults, although for what purpose I’m not sure, since someone like my mother is *never* going to send me a text saying "omg guess wut my bff just told me! o hey i gtg ttfn!"

anyway, these articles always bring up two concerns about this new wave of technological influence on kids: 1) that their language is being corrupted by netspeak and 2) that they are becoming anti social and unable to interact in person due to all their time online, texting, IMing, etc

1) It’s a freaking dialect, a slang. Get over it. It’s not this huge, mystifying thing. It’s simply a written slang instead of a verbal slang. Every generation of twentieth century adolescents has had some sort of slang. It’s not corrupting them. All the "lmao"s and "wut r u up 2"s do not need to be decoded so that adults can understand them, and as soon as they are, the kids will have come up with new expressions, because slang is designed to be exclusive; it is by definition a type of speech understood only by members of a certain social group. As to whether we’re being corrupted… i guarantee that every kid who types "lol" also knows how to say "That was funny", every kid who types "ttfn" knows how to also write "see you later" and every time i type lowercase i on the internet i also know that it is I in formal spelling. I really don’t know why people are so obsessed with and puzzled by this dialect except that we are becoming such prescriptivists (ie, English *should* be like this, no split infinitives, etc)

2) The internets is just another way of communicating. It is true that it is less personal but I don’t find that to be alarming. Most kids still spend plenty of time with their peers in real life interactions in school, at home, on the playground, etc. It’s kind of unavoidable. If I take 30 seconds out of a night out with my friends to text a few times each night, that is still, say, 3 hours and 57 minutes of real life interaction instead of 4 full hours.

I think the real more alarming issue is that our generation feels that it needs constant stimulation, in multiple forms. Today while waiting for the bus I was listening to my ipod, reading time magazine, *and* sitting outside waiting for the bus. When I do my homework online, I am usually listening to music, chatting on aim, maybe checking my e-mail intermittently and doing homework. When in class most students prefer to do the sudoku *and* listen to the professor.

And the good side is that we are becoming great multitaskers. Most kids my age can easily do all these things and still get the homework done, pay attention in class, etc… it may even help them concentrate and keep them from getting bored and zoning out to have all that constant stimulation. However, I fear that we are training ourselves to be ADD. The fact that our generation has had this explosion of ADD diagnoses is not a coincidence or a fault of drug companies pushing needless products on people by "creating" a need for them. Of course I’m not medical expert and have never suffered ADD; this is just my opinion. But I think that when we train ourselves to respond to so many forms of stimulation at once it becomes hard to sit down and just read a book in silence, unless we’re extremely interested in that particular book. It’s hard for me to walk around with my ipod, like on campus, and nearly impossible for me to run any distance without music. I just get bored, and I don’t think I’m alone in these feelings.

So this is one of the reasons I am hesitant to just jump into new technology just because it is convenient.

And I think we should worry just a little more about this self ADDing and maybe just a bit less about corrupting some invented, non-existent standard of a constantly changing language.