by Malcolm Butler
Cell phones. Twitter (excuse me, X). IG. Facebook. TikTok.
I could go on and on and on and on.
These things all have one thing in common in my personal opinion: they are making us lazy and somewhat unintelligent.
I will raise my hand, at least halfway. I, at times, am one of the guilty ones. I have had to fight it. And I’m not sure if I wasn’t a journalism major and in the communications business, that I would have won this battle.
When I started texting more than a decade ago — heck it may be close to two decades ago — I saw the beginning of the end when it came to so many people caring about proper punctuation and sentence structure. Some of the texts I receive would have Wiley Hilburn’s blue ink all over them.
Who cares about that comma or that period? Who cares if we leave out some words or use slang? It’s the thing to do today.
Then came along Twitter. 144 characters. That’s all we had to get our point across. They squeezed us into poor grammar and punctuation. High school English teachers across the country had a tough enough time before children started growing up using platforms that easily led down an illiterate path at times.
I see poor grammar across all forms of social media in this day and age. And the scary thing is it’s almost becoming acceptable.
It has almost become kool to misspell skool.
It shouldn’t be. It should be a big fat F.
Twitter also made us lazy when it comes to reading. These days if it’s longer than your average Tweet, why read it. Takes way too long, right?
I learned to write by reading the sports pages every day growing up. Sure. It may have just been the sports pages back then, but it still allowed me to read a lot of good writing and develop good habits on proper writing.
Social media has also led us down the road to the 5-second video or the 144-character post (I know, X has now made it where you can use more than 144 characters but the habit has been formed).
I had a conversation Monday with my friends Kyle Kavanaugh and Gerald Jordan over lunch. We were talking about the evolution of how people consume content. The conversation was centered around athletics, but it could be used in almost every setting in this day and age.
The statement was made that communications departments need to focus more of their bandwidth on the 5-second video or the short tweet or the photo with very few words. Otherwise, they are wasting their time because people don’t read anymore.
The old man that yells at the clouds in me took offense to it. I pushed back while also knowing that the statement about how people consume content is correct. Maybe not totally across the board. There are some folks who still like a good 1,500 word feature story on an interesting subject.
But a huge part of our society doesn’t have time (sigh) to sit down and read a good 1,500 word feature story on an interesting subject. It’s crazy to think about.
I see it all the time. Our LPJ stories are posted on Facebook. A lot of times there are comments under the posting asking questions that are answered in the first two or three paragraphs of the story. So why the question? Because they don’t take time to click on the story and actually read it.
If you stop and think about where we have come in the last 20 years, the question bodes where will we be in 20 more.
It’s scary. I wouldn’t want to be an English teacher in today’s world. They are all fighting this idea that there is a new way of reading and writing, one that won’t make us any smarter.
Social media and cell phones aren’t going away. They are here to stay.
But I think — let me say I hope — we will all slow down and take the time to write out a social media post using proper grammar. And I hope we all will take the time to read a story that is more than 200 words.
Let’s not allow these things to dummy us down.
