There was an age, when writing meant an act that involved expressing one’s thoughts, feelings and ideas through words on paper. Penning down thoughts, made it, not just an act but an art form. Today, there is nothing called a ‘handwriting’. Technology has fused all individual and unique characteristics of people into one democratized, homogenous globule of words. People do not write any more, but type down, which makes every letter, every word, look the same, irrespective of the peculiarities of the style of writing of the writer. We are all the same, because of mighty technology. There is a constant dissociation from the words a writer writes.
Today, when we talk about writing, the types that come to our minds are blogs, sms, emails, etc. We have almost completely stopped using the pen unless we need to put down our signatures somewhere. A fast life and an even faster life style have brought about the magnanimous change in the world of writing all together. Mobile texting and writing e mails have made us, chop down words and sentences to fit in the smallest of spaces and limits of being legible. As long as one can make sense out of a message, it is broken down according to convenience.
We shall talk about blogs and cell phone texting separately. Let’s start with blogs and how it came into existence.
Blogging started to get popular since the late 1990s and today, almost every body, knows what is blogging and how to stay connected with the rest of the world through writing blogs and expressing one’s mind. Since it is a thoroughfare, every body, irrespective of writing skills or linguistic knowledge can write blogs. They are as accessible to people as democratic. Anyone can write a blog. It is a platform where nay one can express an idea, a thought or just communicate. Therefore, there remains no benchmark to judge if the piece of writing is at all up to the mark or has good language. As long as it is read by others and is understood, it is accepted. So, we can see that the trend is to give more importance to the idea behind the writing and not the language or the skill of writing. Cell phone texting on the other hand or SMS as we say, stands for short message standard, communication protocol. As the name itself suggests, in texting, we shorten or reduce words to smaller words or even just single letters, for example, be becomes ‘b’, see becomes ‘c’, you becomes ‘u’, are becomes ‘r’, or great can become “gr8”. So, we see that as long as you can decipher the meaning with reference to the context, language goes through quite a roller coaster ride. May, be our modern world demands such a kind of writing technology, but it undoubtedly is killing good English and linguistic artistry for ever.
