BTB (Before the Blog): Pooh-Poohing the Purists, a Scholar Revels in Netspeak

"Dr. Crystal concludes that the Internet is not going to spawn a generation of illiterates, as a cursory look at any undergraduate's e-mail might suggest. On the contrary, he contends, it is developing into a splendid new medium that shows language users at their most inventive, adapting a variety of styles for a variety of purposes, some formal, some highly informal....

'The Internet is a genuine third medium of communication,' Dr. Crystal said. 'In the future it will probably be the main way we humans communicate.'

He sees computer-mediated discourse as the third cardinal event in language. 'First we had speech — that was the real breakthrough,' he said. 'And then, about 10,000 years ago, writing.' Now comes Internet-mediated language....

It is this hybrid of speech and writing that Dr. Crystal analyzes, unworried that English will be ruined by its often casual treatment. On the contrary, he argues, children who spend their day sending instant messages are in no danger of becoming illiterates. 'Children know that you use crazy, geeky language on e-mail and on mobile phones, and then they are sensible when they are writing for the teachers,' he said." [at NY Times, via both2and: beyond binary]

Heads up to library schools: the next course you should be planning is The Online Reference Interview Using Net Language. I'm only half kidding here, but I hope courses like Virtual Reference Librarianship will include a discussion of how to think in abbreviations. For librarians, it will be quite the task to keep up in an IM conversation when the other person isn't capitalizing their words properly or using punctuation, especially with all of the abbreviations strewn throughout. It's shocking at first... until you start doing it yourself.  ;-)