By Justin Maas


Won't somebody please think of the children? Everybody wants to become involved in social media and children are now growing up with it and conversing online like never before. This has apparently had an unfavorable effect on the capability of a lot of people to write effectively. It also poses a question about why there isn't more control over social media.

When someone goes on social media and properly uses "you're" and "your" I am legitimately stunned. This should not be the case. The ability of people to write shouldn't reduce because of social media; it should increase. If we are writing so much online I figure the practice should aid our writing ability not hamper it. Alas, people love to take the easy way out.

Why write "your" when you can write "ur"? People don't want to exhaust their fingers by typing two more letters and it is sad. Social media giant Twitter can also be held responsible for the diminishing capability of the public to communicate properly. Limiting people to 140 characters has given people the justification to type everything in shorthand. Now "you" must turn into "u" on Twitter in order to conserve the "oh so" precious characters needed to properly get your tweet about what you're eating for lunch to fit. Should people tweeting for major corporations use this short hard or would that created negative Twitter PR?

I honestly can't think of the last time I saw someone use the phrase "I couldn't care less" instead of "I could care less". People on social media are so quick to throw out phrases that they are forgetting the meaning behind the words. If you "could care less" it means you do in fact care about what you're writing about. Think before you write.

So is social media causing people to lose contact with the basics of the idiom? Probably. Would I want Facebook and Twitter to shut down? Absolutely not. I want to know what people are eating for lunch and what they could care less about. I'm not sure what life was like before the internet, and quite frankly I don't want to know. Now people can be in touch with poorly written English on any topic they want and I wouldn't have it any other way. These are just a few issues why people have different viewpoints of social media.




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