Debate Team B

As the Nicholas Carr succinctly explains in the Wired Magazine: "e ask the Internet to keep interrupting us in ever more varied ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive."

Love it or hate it, our interaction with our digital devices greatly influences the way we communicate. In fact, it has the potential to render the English language as we know it null and void given enough time

The internet is ruining language and this travesty should be stopped:A worldwide slackening of written and spoken language rules and decorum is eroding the foundation of our language.Text-speak and instant communication platforms are making us lazy in the way we read and write.It looks retarded

Researchers from Penn State recently found that, while text messaging allows tweens to send notes to family and friends in a quick and efficient manner, it may lead to a decline in their language and grammar skills. To begin, more and more tweens are utilizing techspeak (language adaptations) when they text. Techspeak is described as including shortcuts, like homophones, words that omit non-essential letters, and initials to compose a text message quickly and efficiently. The researchers found that those tweens who use it frequently often do poorly on grammar exams.

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus. Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.

Scholars who study the role of media in society say no long-term studies have been done that adequately show how and if student attention span has changed because of the use of digital technology. But there is mounting indirect evidence that constant use of technology can affect behavior, particularly in developing brains, because of heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention.

But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans.

The report by the NEA, a taxpayer-funded independent federal agency, is based on reading trends data collected from more than 40 sources, including other federal agencies, universities, foundations, and associations.

On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

In 2002, only 52 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59 percent in 1992.

Although teachers see a number of advantages in young people's heavy use of digital media (especially in their ability to find information quickly and efficiently), it is the potentially harmful effects that have families, educators and policy makers worried. New York Times' Matt Richtel summarizes these concerns in an article about the studies: "There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks.

So it is with a certain amount of sanctimonious glee that I am able to point out that customers don’t like spelling and grammar mistakes. According to one survey, poor spelling and grammar is the transgression most likely to damage consumer opinion of a brand in social media.

Speed, relevancy, a dollop of wit and strictly no excess words are the key elements for a successful Twitter posting. In fact, the same formula could be applied to Facebook users or anyone looking to be engaging on a social media platform. But such factors, in turn, bring their own problems, especially for the bastion of good, old-fashioned grammar.

For instance, these words bear all the hallmarks of traditional tabloid writing rather than the standard essay structure formula, with frequent use of dashes instead of the text-book comma approach being an obvious example.

However, there can be no doubt that the pace and immediacy of social media does not bode well for the long-standing values of grammar.

Internet chatrooms and social networking sites are encouraging children to spell words incorrectly, new research suggests

A paper released by the English Spelling Society concludes that the internet has revolutionised the English language, and made misspelling the norm.

But this means that children who have been brought up with the internet do not question wrongly spelt words

Auto-complete. Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest. Maybe too used to it, in fact. This handy function seems to make adolescent users faster, but less accurate, when responding to a battery of cognitive tests, according to research published in 2009 in the journal Bioelectromagnetics.

Texting. A study led by researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain surveyed a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds about their texting habits, then asked them to write a sample text in the lab. The scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none. But those children who, when asked to write a text message, showed greater use of text abbreviations (like “c u l8r” for “see you later”) tended to score higher on a measure of verbal reasoning ability—likely because the condensed language of texting requires an awareness of how sounds relate to written English.

Mike, This is a good post. This is something Allan Bloom wrote about in his book “Closing of the American Mind.” The times are lot different. We have become a world of hyper-specialists, who have an excellent vocabulary in their field but not deep vocabulary to understand other issues. They leave that to other specialists to worry about, such as the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.