Texting and Communication

I often wonder what all this technology is doing to our communications these days. I mean, I know that I belong to the generation that literally created txtpsk, evolving it through the earliest days of chatrooms and ICQ. But nowadays (and I am old enough to say that) it just seems to be getting out of hand.

The other day I was hanging out downtown, and I decided to tell a joke to this guy I was talking to. At the punchline he looked at me and said, "Lol." Not spelled it. Said it.

IDK if he was a n00b or if he was just crazy, but this cute redhead at a cafe seat next to us looked at me and colon-dash-endparenthesised. I semicolon-dash-endparenthesised back, and we xchanged dgts.

Isn't it great when languages evolve beyond the need for actual emotions? You can tell how someone's feeling just by using punctuation. You don't need to actually laugh when you can just say "Lol."

There's a great divide here though. My mom makes up txtspk according to some code that she thinks others will understand intrinsically. She hasn't grasped that, as made-up as the language is, it's been around for twenty years and has certain standards applied to it. Her logic: it's made up, so she can make it up too.

I suppose in the final analysis, she's not far off the mark.