Fade to Play

In this week’s New York magazine there is an article entitled “Say Everything” by Emily Nussbaum about how young people are revealing their private lives online (e.g. facebook, blogging) and what this means for our society.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

[Clay] Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.”

That’s a cool metaphor, I respond. “I actually don’t think it’s a metaphor,” he says. “I think there may actually be real neurological changes involved.”

When I read this section, I thought about the actual language being used by youth to communicate with their friends through texting, IMing, Facebook… and how these types of abbreviations (e.g. ttyl — talk to you later) might affect their ability with the classroom. According to this article from Feb 7th, 2007 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Jim Ellis (AP), educators are attributing an increase in errors in their students’ essays to texting and IMing. Although, students may correct themselves by the time they reach university.

Fourteen-year-old Brandi Concepcion, a pupil of Austin’s, said wit, da and dat – used in place of with, the and that – sometimes creep into her homework.

“I write like that in the rough draft, but I try to catch the mistakes before I turn in the final draft,” she said.

Some educators, like David Warlick, 54, of Raleigh, N.C., see the young burgeoning band of instant messengers as a phenomenon that should be celebrated. Teachers should credit their students with inventing a new language ideal for communicating in a high-tech world, said Warlick, who has authored three books on technology in the classroom.

And most avoid those pitfalls once they enter college, said Larry Beason, director of freshman composition at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Ala.

Relevance: How should educators respond when work is submitted using IM-speaking or text-talk? Should it be thought of as a misspelled word, or considered correct, if it can be interpreted by the teacher/TA/professor, the correct meaning?