Literacy in new media - Is it for the better or for the worse?

In the English speaking world, Britain alone generates well over 6 billion short message service (Sms) every month. It is therefore conspicuous enough that people are communicating more and faster than ever. However, these text messages are often cut short and therefore, consonants, vowels and punctuations are dropped. The natural reaction or rather worry to such a cause would be whether text messaging will produce generation of illiterates in the near future.

It is ironic as linguists are not the ones who are concerned about this matter but the teachers in school who have had to mark some some badly written write-ups . David Crystal , a linguist who came up with ' Txtng : the Gr8 db8' basically makes two general points :

• The language of texting is hardly as deviant as people think
• Texting actually makes young people better communicators, not worse.

Those two points aside, it is also almost impossible to accommodate a whole load of specifed information into a text message and therefore, several thousand of made-up words came about. The whole point is that , tailored text predates the text message. After all, who even knows what p.m really stands for? "post-meridiem", latin for "after midday".

I personally feel by knowing the different kinds of usage of english , be it in new-media terms ( electronic text messaging) or even in journalism short-hand, all of it are various ways of communication and it is our responsibility to be aware of it and learn accordingly . As for adults, they should educate the younger generation appropriately and not come across as questioning such language ability as a form of judgment. Logically, before you can learn how to write abbreviated forms effectively, one will need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relates to the letters, as mentioned by David crystal in a written news article. In addition to that, statistics have also shown that the more adept children were at text messaging, the better they did in spelling and writing as they were more aware of what was and was not appropriate.

This whole issue of literacy in the new media still comes aross as a national controversy, but as long as we know our role in what is appropriate in english language , we will inevitably be more responsible for our way of educating ourselves and future generations.