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Great article! I have a younger sister who is 15 and I constantly worry about her possible future inability to carry ftf conversations, conduct herself professionally in job interviews and in the classroom. I find we never talk via the phone but always via text. However, when you spend most of a workday on the phone or on conference calls, sometimes text provides an alternate way to communicate quickly with others.

I think texting is a valuable form of communication under certain circumstances, however, like you said, it should only serve as "an alternate way to communicate quickly with others". It shouldn't be the other way around!

Perhaps it's not so bad anymore, but I have friend who's an associate professor that teaches writing classes. And in the past five years, he's had to grade papers where the student's literally used texting jargon/leet speak in their writing.

This is something that I've been wondering about since texting became so ubiquitous. At first it was a novelty, then something to do for a quick conversation, and now it's moved into full dialogues between people. I, too, wonder about the future generations and the impact this can have on their grasp of grammar. This is the same problem that I have with more and more people moving to telecommuting (even though I do it myself). When is it just TOO much?

I worked on a university IT helpdesk for years, and we used to get emails written in text-speak, but then teachers cottoned on to the fact they needed to teach "how to write an email", rather than "how to write a busines letter", and I haven't seen a text-speak email for years. In fact, those that do text me in text speak tend to be older now, as they have not grasped predictive texting!

@Anton I think that's a great point, I think now more than ever "how to write an email" seems to be an art form and one people know very little about. It seems like such a stupid and easy thing but I see more than my fair share of awful emails and lack of email etiquette. While I'm not downplaying the importance of writing a great critical paper, essay, letter, etc. I think how to write in new media would be something worth spending some time on with students.

@Samantha I agree with your ideas on email etiquette! I've seen many an email message blasting someone in rude and nasty ways that you would never use in person. It's too easy to reply via email or on social media sites in the heat of the moment and forget all courtesy - the online community is too removed from the personal so it doesn't feel real so there won't be real consequences for such harsh words.

It seems that texting allows for more shallow conversations; speaking in person or on the phone would definitely be a more meaningful conversation. I think texting has its place, but it should not be a substitute for good communication with others.

I think you all brought up a good point! Overall, whether we communicate via texting, email, face-to-face, snail mail (does anyone still do this? lol) etc. we need to acknowledge that each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. It's our responsibility as users on how we can utilize them ethically and not be dragged by social mishaps.

@RJ, I agree with what you've said. Texting has its place, and its purpose; it's really its own fascinating type of language, in a way. It's not analogous to business or conversational English (or insert your language here, as I'm sure this is done all over the world!), and shouldn't replace those modes of communicating, but it does have its proper time and place. It's up to schools to teach students how to communicate effectively in writing, according to what's required in higher education and the workplace. Language is constantly evolving, adding some elements and dropping others. Some words, phrases, and grammatical structures grow obsolete over time, and others emerge to take their place. English, in particular, is known for absorbing other languages' words with ease and adding them to the lexicon. I once read a sci fi novel set hundreds of years in the future in which the characters were purportedly speaking English, as the main character (who was from hundreds of years in the past) recognized it, but it sounded as foreign to him as Middle English would to a modern day speaker. Maybe standard English will always have its place as the preferred and proper mode of communication...or maybe we'll end up with something else entirely, as the digital era marches on!

@Meaghan: ooh, them's fighting words! I like to wind stauch grammerians up with the phrase, "Oh, standardised spelling is a Victorian affectation". People even changed the way they spelled their names from time to time. I love the way language evolves. Or at least I did, until young people started spoiling it all, by changing it again after my generation got it right! aa

@Anton: LOL! I agree. but find myself in that texting mess. I remember a few years ago, Meghan, that there was a huge backlash against ebonics. Similar to the texting situation now, but culturally different. It is amazing how language, through media, has just exploded with new concepts. When we talk about digital divide, perhaps we should talk about language. I mean, if I told my father to "google" something he'd think I was crazy. We have words now that simply mean things that certain people "get" while other don't. Not sure what that means.

@Anton, sometimes I want to eat my phone because of it's predictive texting feature. It'll incorrectly "predict" the word while I'm still typing, and by the time I press "enter" it's already got it lined up to be inputted instead.

@Jennifer - check out www.damnyouautocorrect.com

I think it is really interesting how we have managed to turn typos and autocorrect changes into a silly pasttime and part of our everyday vernacular. Similar to how we have now managed to turn "Google" into a verb! Sites like DamnYouAutoCorrect allow people to bond and relate over technological glitches and commiserating over embarassing text mishaps.

My favorite is http://www.parentsshouldnttext.com/.

These are great points here...I sometimes think that more attention needs to be paid to email (and texting) etiquette than even in person. When you've made a verbal misstep, perhaps offended or confused someone, in person, you can see their body language and offer an immediate response to right the situation. Online communications are more of a landmine because you don't know how someone is reading and interpreting something, and you have to wait for more information to proceed (and there could be any number of unknown factors that influence the receipt of that new information...dead phone or wi-fi down, anyone?). If I had a nickel for every friend of mine who has called me to help them figure out what a text or email might mean or how (or if) they should respond to one thing or another, I'd be a rich girl. I spend so much time unpacking the drama that unfolds in an online communication, I feel as if I'm getting a professional credential. Hmm.....

My question for Karen is would people approach a guy to ask how to respond to a text, or is this just part of women's conversation with each other? Jane Austen style stuff. I have said to younger people how lucky they are, whe I wanted to ask a girl out on a date when I was 15, I had to ring her up, or (shudder) ask in person. Now all you have to do is text. The responses I've had have been really interesting about the etiquette of getting the girl's number, then the dialogue that goes on behind the scenes once the invitation is made (as the response does not have to be immediate). It all sounds even more traumatic. I'm also told that ringing someone with a voice call is now regarded as quite rude here, if you don't text first to ask if someone is available. aa

Good article! What I found interesting was the correlation between user demographics being the same online as it is offline, i.e. more males checking political communication online AND offline. I think it shows the transition from offline media use, or more traditional modes to online and often an accumulation of both. A bit off topic but it makes me think about how we're becoming masters of mult-tasking, allowing us to be in tune to several different media - whether it be traditional TV, radio etc, and switching gears to reading news online, watching videos online, listening online. As I type this, I'm researching papers and watching TV and feel like I'm in tune to both. Researching how people are now becoming the ultimate multi-taskers would be interesting. However, because we are becoming such great multi-taskers, are we almost giving ourselves a sort of "ADD" in which, in the future, we'll have a hard time concentrating on ONE thing for a certain amount of time. I find it hard to concentrate often on a project or paper with multiple messages going on, emails coming in, texts, Facebook notifications, etc. and frequently break to do all things at once = a ton of white noise!

I think we can all relate to this wall of digital "white noise" as university students within the information management sector. It seems as though there is a fine line between multi-tasking and organized distraction. I often find myself dividing my time between school work, personal correspondence, and managing my Ebay account, but this doesn't necessarily mean I'm being more efficient. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT, has actually proven that the human brain "can't focus on more than one thing at a time" (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794).

Great article @ ABC. I was doing some research for my group project for the unit about e-books, brain, order, etc. and have become extremely interested in the impact of technology on our brain. As much as we may like to think we are great multi-taskers, it seems that our ability to toggle between multiple tasks on computers has hindered our ability to focus on long-winded tasks.

When thinking about how technology molds our own identities, it is intriguing then to consider how it helps us create these secondary or multiple identities for MMO's and RPG's. I feel we could even take this one step farther to the relationship between technology, the internet and fandom, where online communities created and populated by fans of a certain artifact create, in a sense, a whole new world to inhabit.

@Natalie: Have you tried playing The Sims (http://thesims.com/en_us/what-is-the-sims)? This game is a perfect example of what you're trying to achieve, "playing a game while simultaneously adopting or constructing a new persona or identity as part of the game".

The in-text link to the article: " The High-Tech Gift Economy" is also worth a read. It compares the proliferation of shareware and open source software to the political movement of anarcho-communism.

Oh dear. I wasted many an hour on Farmville back when it was big...way more than I'd like to admit. That's a neat connection between the digital farm and the real world--and how people's obsession over the game (though I don't know if it's still the case...I deactivated my Farm because it was, well, eating up my entire life!) speaks to something deeper, like the desire for community.

There are some failures in the analysis made in the "High Tech Gift Economy". Thinking that the internet was created by the military is a bit of a canard: in my opinion it was the most inventive misuse of military money by a university. Also there is a conception that the 'net runs on the love of pixies and nerds, where in reality it runs on commercial networks successfully making money. I'd much prefer pixie net, but it just ain't so :(

I remember playing farmville and cafeville for a few months. They were catchy, but I felt they were a bit off. The idea of being chained to the computer so my crops would not spoil or my food would not overcook was draining, so I finally gave them up. Plus, the more I read about Zygna, the less I liked them as a company. Here is an blog post about how farmville and the like induce anxiety by design. http://consumerist.com/2010/12/game-developer-says-farmville-is-designed-to-be-negative-and-draining.html

That's really interesting Jorge: I used to play civilization, but it doesn't help me relax, it just winds me up for hours, in much the same way. Then I discovered Osmos, and have a game that actually feels calm and meditative, bizarrely enough. I had enough of those damn smirking pigs, that's for sure: no wonder the birds are angry.

I never got into Farmville myself, but I do remember my news feed on Facebook being overrun with notifications that friends wanted to share their crops and farm animals with me. I got the feeling there was a mob mentality to the game and I was personally turned off by the idea of buying into a product simply because many of my friends did so. The game shows how much our lives can be affected by technology when a "game" dictates how we schedule much of our time just to ensure our imaginary crops don't wither before we can harvest them.

Anton, I agree, Civ would keep me up for hours and hours, but I would argue that Civ is different from the farmville model because it is not oriented towards a repetitive (and time based) requirement that one has to come back to the computer a certain time later to click on stuff. Even the social aspect of farmville is a kind of pressure to get more friends into the game just to unlock more stuff, rather than to share in a community effort or a competition.

You should definitely look at Jesse Schell's lecture (I think maybe next week?) I put it as optional but do take a look.

I do not understand the appeal of Farmville or any other of the 'games' on FB. I guess I also don't understand some people's obsession with their FB or Twitter accounts. If I want to keep in touch with my friends and family, I text or phone them directly - I feel more connected by having direct interactions with them versus reading their wall or sending them a 'gift' for their fake farm. I feel relieved that I no longer have a FB account, and stay in close contact with those people that I really want to keep in contact with. I don't think the 'social' aspect of FB is a substitute for F2F interactions with people you actually like instead of Like.

I think this is not a good trend, although FB will probably make it happen anyway. It is already pretty obvious that today's teens do not know how to interact socially in a proper manner - they text constantly even while standing next to each other because they prefer to send messages and avoid f2f interaction; they construct sentences in a twitter-like manner. Kids need to form friendships and interact socially face-to-face, not just virtually. They need to speak to others live, know how to write coherent sentences, and not spend so many hours glued to their technical devices. Parents need to impose more guidelines. Librarians can help by assisting in finding age-appropriate websites for children. We don't need to take away the technology, but we do need to help teens and children use it in a better way.

I guess the logic is that kids under 13 are using the site anyway, by lying about their age or getting someone older to create an account for them, so perhaps the best course of action is to create a space specifically for them--with more restrictions and stricter privacy settings. I hope that this pre-teen space is diligently patrolled, and content vetted thoroughly before it gets posted online (sort of like having a forum moderator approve all posts before they appear on the site). I'm not sure if this is feasible....I suppose it depends on how many pre-teens sign on to this thing.

I. don't. like. this. My 12-year old wants a FB account simply because all his friends have one and not for any other reason. It just adds one more layer of policing that schools and parents have to be on top of. I am one of the lucky few parents whose kids are pretty good at self-policing their screen time, but I know that's rare. There are plenty of fun, age-appropriate sites for kids that age -- Pottermore comes to mind... my kids both signed up for accounts there and spend time doing the things tweens like to do, i.e. dueling their friends and socking away Galleons in their Gringotts bank accounts. If they spend a hour on Pottermore, then they know they have to go outside and shoot hoops for an hour. I am a little shocked, actually, that FB thinks tweens are a shoe-in market, since usually that demographic wants NOTHING to do with what their parents do... has FB really cracked the generation gap??

While I don't condone kids spending all their time on the internet, interacting with their friends through IM, I do understand the need for Facebook to create a space for kids under 13. Kids *are* using it anyway, so it only stands to reason (in my opinion) that FB do the responsible thing and police them. My step-sons both have accounts on FB. The oldest is now 13, so he's legitimate, but the youngest is 11 and he wanted one because his brother had one. He also so he could keep in touch with us (he's in Kansas, we're in NJ), so his step-father set up the account and monitors it. I would be a lot happier with him being in a policed-by-moderators environment so I didn't have to rely on his step-dad to do it. I think that there's an upside to the possible changes to FB, as long as it can be properly implemented and policed. I'm just an optimist, what can I say? And yes, I also believe that FB has possibly put a little crack in the generation gap.

The biggest question for me is how will the children under 13 who desire to have a facebook account react when they learn that to do it, the account must be connected to their parents account? At some point every child does something that they do not want their parents to know about..... would that be a deterrent? Would they continue to lie about their ages and use the other tips and tricks to fool the system? Back when I was 14-15 I had a "LiveJournal" account, that I willingly gave my mother access too. I had nothing to hide. But I lost several friends who felt betrayed that my mom was able to then see their posts through my account. I trusted my mom, but my friends didn't. Its a tricky web of social norms, relationships and technology.

I think this an inevitable situation because it's so easy to circumvent the system by just modifying the birth year. Facebook is probably just trying to protect themselves from future legal actions by letting the parents be responsible for accounts of their kids. I still don't like this but let's face the reality, Internet is so big and difficult to be policed.

This is an interesting blog as long as you can get around the book promotions :-) I thought the Social Media section on the site particularly interesting. One of the articles I liked was the one on Smartmobbing by Howard Rheingold (http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5484). This is an interesting idea because a lot of politically charged organizations are utilizing social media to basically create online mobs. Social media is now used to organize petitions, spread the word about marches, and basically spread information. People who were once sort of out of mainstream politics can now get involved and keep track of what is going on in the world. Social media has definitely influenced politics, changing the way parties endorse their candidates and more.

@ Maranda (aside... I didn't see a way to "comment on a comment" so I am posting this directly under the main post) -- I think the the social mobbing you mention is a really interesting trend. In my town, we recently started an online petition through change.org to keep our town pool. It took only a few days to get twice the signatures we needed and no gas was used or feet blisters created. I am trying to think critically of a downside to this manner of using social tools, but I cannot think of one! @Jorge -- Very nice blog. I found a great article (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428043/there-is-no-digital-divide/) debating the other side of the digital divide argument posed by the NYT's piece from last week. I also like Rheingold's "infotention" invention. I could use a little "infotention" intervention -- every time I get involved with a tech or social tool, a new one is created that seems better and more suited to whatever task I was trying to accomplish. Sometimes I feel as if we are living in a time when nothing remains permanent.

This guys seems very clever and witty! I enjoyed reading his blog about Twitter (http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/05/11/twitter-literacy-i-refuse-to-make-up-a-twittery-name-for-it/) talking about how this powerful social media can be so influential and useful if the user knows how to utilize it for the right reasons. Being a non-Twitter user, I found it interesting how he explained numerous advantages of being an active member. Now that I've read this, I might reconsider of joining it...

This was a very informative blog! Thanks Jorge. Like Pam, I really liked the "infotention" idea. diigo is a perfect example. I really just started looking at it today and was really confused (if you couldn't tell with my questions) on how it worked, where to comment, etc. The more I've looked at it today, the easier it has become to use. But something new will probably come along in the net couple months and then I'll have to learn how something works all over again.

A passionate advocate for LGBTQ youth and outspoken opponent of bullying, cyber or otherwise, she's written extensively about Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi, and the role played by serious misuse of digital technology to malign an individual. She also goes into how "media-driven narrative" has shaped public perception of this case: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2012/02/24/stop-the-cycle-of-bullying.html

Thanks for sharing this...I saw danah boyd give a keynote at a conference here in Maryland called Theorizing the Web and she was definitely a big deal. Actually, come to think of it, the notes from that conference might have some information to share here as well.

An excerpt from boyd's notes on her speech about "the power of fear in networked cultures" "The tools that we build are getting repurposed around the globe by people with all sorts of different agendas. They're being used by activists to challenge the status quo, but they're also being used by the status quo to assert new kinds of authority. People are building the new networks of power on the technological networks that we've generated and they're reinforcing existing power structures. "Through social media, we're ramping up the attention economy. We are setting in motion new networks. We like to think of ourselves as disrupting power systems and, indeed, that's what we were doing for a long time. But now, those in power are leveraging our tools to exert new forms of power. Fear is one of the tools that's being used. People are finding ways to put fear into our systems. "Social media is no longer the great disrupter. It is now part of the status quo. Are we prepared for what that means? Are we prepared for the ecosystem that we've created? Do we even understand how our systems are being employed by those hellbent on maintaining power in a networked age? "I don't have good answers to these socio-technical conundrums. But I think that these are important issues and I need your help in figuring out where to go from here."

good find! you will encounter more of her work later on

I second on the good find comment! Her post about Ravi's conviction was interesting, not only because it hits home because it happened at RU, but it brings up some extremely important topics when it comes to online bullying, the use of technology/media in the private/personal sphere, privacy etc. And she closes with saying she would hope this case would change others' actions and outlook on the harmful uses of technology and invasion of privacy, but unfortunately it most likely won't and we will continue to see these types of things happening.

Thank for that! I'm really enjoying this, and it is helping me think about the culture of unease we seem to be living in. http://talks.webstock.org.nz/speakers/danah-boyd/culture-fear-attention-economy/ where

What you will find is that there are many centers doing research on the impact of social/digital media, and they are very good resources for primary info

I should, however, note that I would like to know more about their survey and how they administered it. From a methods point of view it's always a good practice to learn more.

This is a fantastic journal. I use it a LOT and so do students when they are doing research for their projects.

I love this journal, Karen, and have used it a lot in past research projects. Thanks for putting it back in my brain waves!

First Monday is such a great blog!! It has been a great asset to me in several classes in the past, I'm glad someone brought it up here!

It's actually not a blog -- it's an online (legit) journal. It's a place you all should really check out as you pursue your final projects.

I have always been ify about open access journals because sometimes they are not refereed very well... or at all. Also, many open access journals have contributors to books and articles pay a fee for having their articles hosted online--of course they have to make their money somewhere but often it is hard for scientists/professors to take that money out of their budget depending on the cost. (could also be my publishing bias). That being said, First Monday seems to have a fairly thorough peer review process according to its policies, so I will definitely check it out.