I am a nineteen-year-old college student.  My friends have been known to refer to me (less than fondly) as the grammar police.  I rely heavily on text messaging for my daily communication.

As such, I feel that I have something relevant to say about this topic.

When I began this project, I expected to find evidence that English is being eroded.  My traditional Catholic-school grammar education has stood me in good stead; but I witness poor grammar and spelling every day when I log on to Facebook, the social networking website preferred by (more or less) everyone I know.  The latest fad on Facebook is to "like" pages such as "I hate it when someone puts ur name in the Goblet of Fire without telling u" or "Parents call it 'Back Talk' we call it 'explaining why their wrong'."  My home page is full of them.  Occasionally I say to myself, I would actually like that if it were grammatically correct.  Actually visiting some of these pages is even worse.

So as I was reading my first scholarly article on this topic, I was skeptical of its claims that language is safe.  After all, I sometimes do a double-take when encountering "its," "your," or "there" even in their correct settings.  Then I came upon this bit about a study of instant messaging: "participants... monitored their spelling and tried to correct errors if they occured, often due to fast typing.  Participants would indicate to conversation partners that they realized they had made a spelling mistake by typing the correct spelling preceded by an asterisk" (Quan-Haase).
 
I read this and thought, this is my life that they're studying.  In my experience it is completely true; my friends and I asterisk-correct all the time.  I began to realize that I, like most fearmongers, was focusing on a small percentage of technology-enabled communication when I judged its grammar. 

I have, in fact, had that awkward experience: having trouble understanding a text message because of the nonsensical "textese" in which it is written.  That does happen.  But therein also lies the rub: those texters are unusual.  Mention that they are difficult to interpret and another friend will probably say, "Yeah, he/she texts weird."  Most of us can understand each other -- because we use only the simplest and most common shortenings.

Of course, I still think that people need to cut out the abbreviations on Facebook and other websites.  For the adept typists we should all be by now, typing "you" takes only a fraction of a second longer than typing "u."  Surely we aren't that busy.  But the people with the worst habits are also, most likely, the youngest.  They are still exploring the world that is at their fingertips, and we must trust that in time they will sort themselves out.

The horror stories are horrific, but studies are showing that the overall culture is not that bad.  I'm grateful for that, for cyberspace is an essential part of the habitat of my generation.  We work here, play here, and communicate here.  Like it or not, communication technology is here to stay, and we intend to make the most of it.