2 cool 4 skool?

The Texting Debate:
Part One

There has been a lot of academic discourse circulating among professors at universities across America. It's difficult to determine a consensus among faculty, as they differ in opinion to the technological phenomenon having an impact on undergraduate students. As a future educator, it is worthwhile to investigate the evidence and support for and against it's purpose in academia, in order to formulate my own opinion and decide how I will address the effects of texting in my classroom.

While most educators recognize that texting is widely used by adolescents and young adults in the United States, there seem to be two distinct opinions of its effect on student academics. The first being that so-called "Internet English" is only paving another tainted road on the English language. As a breakdown of the English language – according to an article in The New York Times, "Some teachers see the creeping abbreviations as part of a continuing assault of technology on formal written English" (Lee, 2002). Educators who argue this point believe that technology (more specifically, texting) is skewing student's ability to write formally in academia.

On the other side of this debate, there are educators who regard this same "Internet English" not only as an example of how language is constantly developing and changing, but also as a type of literacy in and of itself, which can be capitalized on to engage students in more traditional learning. Educators who argue this point believe that the more students write (no matter what format it is written in), the better they will get at writing.

To investigate this debate further, I researched one of the top advocates for this argument.

To Be... or Not to Be... In the Moment, Is the Question:
Naomi Baron--American University


Linguistics professor at American University, Naomi Baron, argues that text messaging is destroying a student's ability to "be in the moment." In her book, Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where it's Heading, Baron discusses the continuing fear of technological advancement, as it effects language in a negative way. In her book, she argues:

Addicted or not, hard-core texters find it difficult to be 'in the moment' with other people because they are constantly being summoned by someone else in another place. It is part of a larger phenomenon of where is your mind? If your mind is always on your phone, it's not on other things. There is a cost when people multitask —a kind of a mental brownout. If a student is reading Shakespeare when a text message interrupts, Hamlet's going to fade in and out in a ghostly fog. You're not truly time-sharing. You're flitting back and forth, and the flitting itself is taking processing capacity. (Baron 37)

Baron also raises the concern that texting bastardizes the English language. In her book, she researches and analyzes student writing and indicates that students who text message on a frequent basis often use improper abbreviations, incorrect punctuation, and bad grammar in their academic writing.

According to Lee (2002), "teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @." I have a question about these teacher's speculations. Have any of them considered that these mistakes could be unintentional? Baron (among other supporters of this viewpoint) would argue that as students use text messaging more and more frequently, they are becoming more accustomed to the informality of its language, and no longer notice the differentiation between informal and formal language. Montana Hodgen, a 16-year old high school student in Montclair, New Jersey, "was so accustomed to texting abbreviations that she often read right past them" (Lee, 2002). As Hodgen puts it, "I was so used to reading what my friends wrote to me in a text message that I didn't even realize that there was something wrong." She said her ability to separate formal and informal English declined the more she used text messages" (Lee, 2002).

After researching this viewpoint, I decided that there has been enough negativity on the subject, and there must be scholars in academia that see texting in a positive light.