A very interesting view from Writinghood on the impact of blogging and text messaging on the written word: Is Technology Killing Writing?
I would agree with the assessment, but I think that while writing skills may be improving (LOL ur rite! notwithstanding), in my mind there’s a breakdown of the face to face communication skills that include facial expression and gestures of body language since we’ve come to depend upon all caps and exclamation points and key signs such as 🙁 to express the feeling behind the words. There is also more of a tendency to rely on methods that really distance our relationships. And this presents a catch-22 situation perhaps; while there is wider range of communication–people we might never have had contact with otherwise whom we have reached via weblogs, social networking, and text messaging–there is also the circle that we have found we can more easily keep up with via these methods and so face to face has become the rarity. In that manner, we are indeed distancing ourselves from relationships.
There’s research I’m sure on the changes that technology has made in our interpersonal communications, just as letter writing via the U.S. mail, telegraph, telephones and two tin cans and a string have changed the nature of man.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology