Unit 2 Draft

Is Texting Ruining the way we Communicate and Write?

      Take a look at the open apps on your phone. How many of them can be used to communicate with others? For me personally, I had messages, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat open on my iPhone. I'll be the first to admit that I spend a good portion of my day on my phone. Nonetheless, I am still in constant contact with my friends via several different platforms. Whether I am updating my group chat on who I just saw on the quad, texting classmates about our group assignment or retweeting a recent news article, my life updates are frequently being sent out to various friends and followers on the Internet. I am in Generation Z and I believe phones represent a large portion of who we are as a generation. Furthermore, I believe however the time we spend on our phones is NOT ruining the way we communicate and write. 

      If you are reading this and are between the ages 16 and 24, I can guarantee you've been yelled at for being on your phone before. I myself have been countless times by my mother. "Did you even hear anything I just said? That phone of yours is too distracting." she'll say. However, she is wrong. My phone isn't distracting me necessarily, its simply changing the way I communicate. Communication in today's age is constant, quick and never ending. While my generation is adopting to this new method seamlessly, older generations, such as my own mom, are having trouble grasping the concept. For example, why would I send a Thank You note to my grandma through snail mail which will take a week to get to her in California, when I could email or text her in seconds and have her receive my gratitude almost instantly. My mom would say sending snail mail is more "respectful and shows more appreciation" but she simply doesn't understand that communication is ever-changing. 

      Have you ever sat in a room before with a group of friends, however all of you are sitting on your phones staring at screens? One may think this is the concept of lost communication however they are wrong. Sitting silent in a room with 5 different people, I could be having 5 different conversations. Sending memes to one friend, discussing homework problems with another, and having an emotional support conversation with a third. Phones and texting allows us to expand our abilities of communication. I could be having one spoken conversation or multiple ones over my device simultaneously. Having multiple conversations at once allows me to interact with more people throughout my day, whether its face to face or not. According to representatives from English Live, they stated, "Text messaging can be a fun and playful way to communicate – the important thing to remember for education is teaching children how to employ different ways of communication. Writing an essay and writing a text are different things; children can learn both. What is more, texting is being used to actually help literacy in developing countries: a UN SMS-based literacy program in Pakistan aims to help women in Islamabad to read. Now what’s so bad about that?" This shows that texting isn't a bad thing at all and in fact, it is helping some individuals actually learn how to read and have the ability to communicate with one another. People simply need to learn how to except that texting a completely valid and normal way to communicate and express yourself with one another. 

      Next, one might say the slang we use while communicating on our phones is making us dumb, however language is ever changing. Everyone is quick to jump the gun on how we shouldn't be using worlds like LOL and OMG yet no one ever talks about how nobody says words like doth or henceforth.