That's What She Said

By Brittany DeVries

How does one cross paths with strangers, study for a well procrastinated final, make plans for coffee, end up where we all end up 3 a.m. Sunday morning with beer in hand, butt in swivel seat, and eyes, though fatigued, reflecting millions of bright pixels?
It is the Internet, my friends, the World Wide Web, cyberspace, the online server to which we all subscribe our lives.
Blasphemy!
Yet, despite the loaded criticism ,many of us young men and women receive from our elders, through which the internet is attributed to its explicitness, its social seclusion, its open-door policy that allows any lowly one or another to position himself with referential authority. This online network is seeping through the cracks with a revolutionary impulse.
It is an impulse that they just don’t understand.
They don’t understand the influence of an encyclopedia developed by the minds of absolutely anyone, and openly edited by anyone else.
They don’t understand the personal sustenance of blogs and websites, where technological efficiency falls into the hands of the human palette.
They don’t understand that the lexicon developed over time is a linguistic evolution, disparate from not only the laws now plaguing J.K. Rowling, but also from the standards of English.
Of course there is reason to be concerned that the human species from this generation forward will lose sight of all grammatical rules, not able to correct spelling errors, nor understand when one confuses a word for a word that is not a word at all.
LOL.
Developing from many tedious text messages, IM’s, wall posts, and e-mails, in which our explosive young minds just cannot  spit out all we want to say  before the irritatingly loud space bar moves on, is not just an English slang about which our professors cringe. Word development, and particularly letter deletion, is embedded in history, letter by letr.
There is room enough to criticize this monopolizing, worldly-expanding, technologically preening system, but one cannot deny the grand educational, social, and technological platforms this broadband server has put us on.
Before we call in the enforcement, think about this generation’s ability to renovate our written language, provide the hope for love to even the shyest Facebooker, and the ability to turn conversations and knowledge into a universal pool where every perspective is, at last, clearly heard.