Tyler Cerrito Mrs.

Raymond English 1103 9 September 2013 Illiterate Technology My literate life in the twenty-first century has been greatly shaped by the technology that has been available and is being made more widely available in recent years. One of the technologies that has affected my literacy in a negative way is instant messaging or text messaging a.k.a. texting. This continues to decline the quality of my literacy every day. I think this has to do mainly because of the abbreviations thats make up almost every text message that is sent. Instead of thinking of ways of showing our happiness with words we, as the texting population, would just say lol which most of the time is a lie because we arent actually laughing out loud and never would at something that is so lacking in funniness. So in this way there is no originality ever used in my own life because one of my main avenues of communication has been so limited by using the abbreviations that have become so popular and a habit for me to use daily. Even for meaningful phrases there are abbreviations, such as ily, which is, in my opinion, counterproductive. Is an abbreviation really necessary? Do you not at least love the person enough to spend two more seconds and type out I love you? This is how technology has affected the way that I speak and communicate, by degrading the meaning of words and limiting my useable vocabulary only to replace it with some abbreviations.