Connected Lives (Part Six)

LOL.

ROFL.

POS.

TTYL.

TTFN.

Do you recognize each of those abbreviations? If not, they stand for:

Laughing on line.

Rolling on floor laughing.

Parents over shoulder.

Talk to you later.

Ta ta for now.

I wonder how many times each day, those and other shortcuts like them are transmitted via text or instant message, or email. I think it would be even more interesting to know the age breakdown of the folks using those abbreviations. Are they the vernacular of teenagers? Twenty-somethings? Or Baby Boomers?

Actually, they are used by all age groups.

Does all the text messaging, emailing, commenting on blogs, and other forms of shortcutting impact the quality of our writing such that tomorrow’s adults will be less competent writers?

The results of a recent survey might surprise you, as they did me.

I never hand-write documents other than checks, a note for the cleaning lady or the occasional Hallmark card. I began typing all of my work in high school and continued right through law school (I typed every law school exam, and even took a back-up typewriter with me to the Bar Examination, lest my well-used Brother conk out in the middle of an essay question).

However, a new survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that two-thirds of American high school students complete their assignments by hand, rather than using the computer. In fact, for personal writing outside school, longhand is even more popular. It is the preferred form for nearly three-quarters of teens. Not as surprisingly, teenagers who blog are more likely to engage in personal writing and tend to believe that writing will prove crucial to their eventual success in life.

Their parents were found more likely than teens to believe that Internet-based writing such as e-mail and instant messaging affects writing overall, though both groups are split on whether the electronic communications help or hurt. Nonetheless, 73 percent of teens and 40 percent of parents believe Internet writing makes no difference either way.

However, two-thirds of the students who responded to the survey admitted that abbreviations such as those listed above and emoticons like have slipped into their school assignments and other formal writing. In fact, not surprisingly, they are more likely to find their way into the work of students who blog or use sites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Parents and teenagers disagree on the question of whether such informal writing impacts young people’s development of formal writing skills. 73 percent of the teens believe that internet writing techniques make no difference and do not effect their ability to write well in other settings, but only 40 percent of the parents who answered the survey questions felt the same way.

What do you think? Have you caught an occasional “LOL” or “TTYL” slipping into your business correspondence or formal writing? Or did it happen without you noticing so that it was brought to your attention by the recipient of the communication? Is “internet writing” having any impact upon your real world skills? Leave a comment!

Originally published at Write Stuff.

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Connected Lives (Part Five)

In a recent meeting with my colleagues, we all sat around a conference table, our identical Blackberries in front of us. As one by one the Blackberries chirped, clicked, chimed, and buzzed, we found ourselves laughing at we looked at each other and then down at our individual devices, simultaneously declaring, “It’s yours” or “It’s mine.”

As the meeting went on, we each took our turn emailing as the speaker continued talking, holding the little silver gadgets in our laps or just under the edge of the table, typing with our thumbs in a failed attempt to be unobtrusive and not disrupt the proceedings. Every one of us was, at some point, guilty of allowing technology to interrupt and compete with our focus upon what was being discussed in that room.

I have now made it my practice, when I am speaking to a group, to announce at the outset that I expect cell phones and Blackberries to be turned off or, at a minimum, put on the “vibrate” setting. I ask my audiences not to place their devices on the table in front of them, but, rather, to store them in their bag or pocket and use them only during breaks.

For the most part, my request is ignored. It is not uncommon to see attendees going in and out of the room as I am speaking.

I have tried a number of techniques to discourage and eliminate the behavior. For instance, when the IPhone first hit the market, I jokingly told my audiences that, if their phone rang during my presentation, I would confiscate it the way my son’s high school principal once collected his — and kept it until Friday afternoon. (You would have thought the world had quit spinning on its axis! I think I was actually punished, rather than my son, because I had to listen to him whine and complain about not being able to send text messages to his friends for four days.) I added, “So if you have an IPhone, please let it ring because I’m looking for one. We will trade phones and I’ll thank you before you leave today.” Everyone laughed, but no one really got the message.

I’ve also stopped my presentation and waited for the offender to finish his/her activity, encouraging the rest of the audience to join me in watching him/her type. Undeterred, their thumbs have generally continued flying over the tiny keys until they are ready to hit “send.” When a class participant gets up and leaves the room, I sometimes encourage the rest of the class to wave at them as they exit, saying, “Let’s all wave!” or asking the person walking out with his/her cell phone up to his/her ear, “I hope you’re not going away angry.” Generally, they turn, wave back, laugh . . . and keep talking as they walk out the door.

Yes, I am a frustrated stand-up comic.

But I am also a frustrated public speaker.

I am old enough to remember life before cell phones and Blackberries. I recall when business was transacted without those convenient tools. I remember when a secretary would have to actually get up out of his/her chair and walk to a conference room to summon his/her boss to take a telephone call. Better yet, I remember the days when my secretary told callers, “I’m sorry, but she’s in a meeting. I’ll have her return your call when it concludes.” People were satisfied with that response. Whatever the issue was, it would wait for an hour, two hours, or even until the following day.

These days, secretaries just send an email, knowing that the boss will read it while in a meeting, class or seminar.

It seems that every issue has now been elevated to “urgent” status, requiring an immediate response. Just as our attention spans have shrunken so has our ability to receive responses to inquiries, address issues, and resolve conflicts. And as the acceptable “turn-around” time has evaporated, so, too, has our ability to analyze, ponder, consider, and deliberate over important matters. To our detriment, in my opinion.

With those quick responses come off the cuff remarks, snarky replies, and split-second decision-making that all too often, we regret later, especially when we realize that there was more information to be gathered, more factors to be taken into account, about which we were unaware when we fired off that reply email or text message.

How does all of this bode for the business and world leaders of tomorrow? Teenagers and even younger children are experts at text messaging. While weBaby Boomers have had to work to become adept at typing with our thumbs, and still struggle to remember which key is for punctuation and which is for the number keypad, not to mention grasp the text lingo, our kids find it perfectly natural.

Are we raising a generation of impulse buyers and leaders with attention spans matching those of gnats? And how can we ask them to pay attention in school and refrain from text messaging and emailing during class, using the cell phones and Blackberries we provide them, if we can’t refrain from the obnoxious and rude conduct ourselves? In other words, shouldn’t we be setting a better example, modeling behavior that will encourage them to “do as I do,” rather than as I say?

Leave a comment!

Originally published at Write Stuff.

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Friday’s Feast #188

Appetizer

Name something you would categorize as weird.

Peanut butter and tuna sandwiches. My oldest son used to eat them every day. In fact, for awhile, I had to make them and pack them in his lunch. Thank God he outgrew that phase!

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Connected Lives (Part Four)

Here in California, it is unusually cold for late April, but that was fine with me. I settled in last evening, wrapped in my favorite blanket, to watch the seventh and final installment of HBO’s spectacular adaptation of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. As with the prior episodes, I was not disappointed. The story of their lives was told with painstaking accuracy and the kind of attention to detail that has already rendered this mini-series a classic. As McCullough predicted, the audience comes away not just with information about the origins of this country, but “feeling what happened.”

What fascinated me as I watched each week was the central role played by the writings of the characters not just in shaping the foundation of the United States, but in providing us the ability, more than two hundred years later, to appreciate and understand how they lived, what they thought, and how their actions formed the world’s greatest democracy.

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