I came across the article The Twitter Trap, and I though it was really interesting. The author starts talking about how he let his 13 yr old daughter get a Facebook, (I don’t have the slightest idea why he would let his 13 yr old get a facebook) and how she had 171 friends within a few hrs. He talks about inventions such as the calculator diminishing our math skills, “GPS has undermined our mastery of city streets,” and how typing has “killed penmanship.”
So what has Twitter done to us!? Not only can our tweets be 140 characters long, (if you don’t use one of those special websites) you have to figure out how to say what you want to say in 140 characters. This causes us to make up abbreviations, misspell words, and not use correct grammar. Its fine for twitter, i’m pretty sure 90% of the people who follow you will understand, but more than often you will find yourselves writing a paper for class and using the same characteristics. Instead of writing “you”, you write “u.” It takes you more time to write a paper because you have to be going back and correcting what you are misspelling. This is just one of the few ways that twitter makes you stupid. I am guilty of all of this, because as I sit here writing this post, I have to go back and fix my misspelling of u and r.
-Armenis Perez
Twitter is one in a long line of successive technological changes in communication that emphasize speed. Changes in communication have always surrounded speed; getting the message there faster. With the birth of the internet and e-mail, instant messaging and services like twitter, communication has become nearly instantaneous. Rather than sitting down and drafting a message, we are often in the position where broadcasting our content is a click away. Knowing that the action can be completed so soon perhaps puts an immediacy on what we are doing. We are almost instant messaging or tweeting as fast as we could speak — if only we could be even faster. Abbreviations get us that much closer to clicking that button to send out our message. Once a culture of internet abbreviations has been established, a standard exists. Not only can most people understand the abbreviations and acronyms, but seeing them so often makes them more acceptable. It spreads to more and more people and moves from subculture to mainstream. This environment is ripe for a service like Twitter: the faster the better, abbreviations, acronyms OK. 140 words can also keep time to a minimum.
Additionally, when people can rely on things like spell check, it lessens the need to spell out full words. Even a web browser can perform a spell check (who knew I couldn’t spell “abbreviation” properly? Apparently, Firefox did). You rarely, if ever, have a reason to spell out a full word.