This question came from a forum board which I frequent:
Do you think the advent of social networking (Facebook etc) has killed the forum boards or is it a more specific decline based on subject matter? Or is it that people aren't as good as writing as they were?
I don't necessarily see this as a specific problem to do with forums but a symptom of a far-wider ranging miasma of declining rates of functional literacy generally.
I will attribute some of the blame at the feet of Twitter, MySpace and the Book of Faces because where once were pieces of text in which some degree of thought used to be employed, there are now shorter grabs of 140 characters or less in some cases. However I don't think that social media by itself at fault but society as a whole.
This is the distilling of a process which has been going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
The Bible records in both the book of Nehemiah (chapter 13) and the letter to the Hebrews (chapter 9) that "all of the law was read to the people". Now I'm assuming that probably refers to "the law" as contained in the Book of Leviticus, so "all of the law" amounts to 27 chapters which have to be read in a public place.
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul rambled on for so long that one poor chap fell asleep and fell out of a window (Acts 20).
If you look at the great age of the novel, books like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens' Bleak House or even James Joyce's Ulysses, are all hefty tomes which are vastly more complex than the radio serials which began in the 1930s or television programs which all fit nicely into half-hour blocks.
Whereas once people would be content to stand out in a field and tend livestock, watching as each day told a unique story (I earnestly believe that it was shepherds who invented the game of cricket), people's attention spans which used to last hours now barely last seven minutes, and 140 characters of a twitter post is a logical extension of this whittling away of patience.
I think that because people generally don't have anything like the same amount of patience that people had in the past, coupled with the fact that they simple aren't engaged to anywhere near the same degree as they once were with the written word, that people's language skills have suffered as a result.
I work as a forensic accountant and so deal with legal firms on a semi-regular basis and it staggers me at just how poor so-called "professional" correspondence has become. I see errors in spelling and grammar which should make the average 8th grader cringe (but sadly doesn't) and whilst I will accept that English might not be the first language of some people and concede the fact that the language does evolve, it is still not an excuse for the hideousness which I see quite often in written English from people who should know better and especially from people who's very profession lives in the realm of producing and gleaning information from written English.
A poor standard of English has even infected mainstream media. There has been a noticeable decline in the quality of writing in “newspapers of record” like The Times and The Daily Telegraph etc. and I’m willing to bet that that is consistent across the Anglosphere.
In Australia, our own Sydney Morning Herald has been on the slide in my lifetime but I'm glad to say that Sydney's Daily Telegraph has actually improved in quality since the days that it merged with The Daily Mirror, though I think that that has more to do with the influence of AAP than anything else.
George Orwell decried "ugly and inaccurate" English in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and although he was more concerned about media and politicians using language to conceal their intent and advocated the use of Plain English, I take his point to some degree but also disagree with him on other points.
I happen to like using florid language partly because I take joy in "the flower of English". I like the ability to select and mould paragraphs to change the colour and tone of meaning. So in that respect I differ from Orwell quite strongly but I totally agree with him in that if you don't properly craft your pieces of writing, then the language itself suffers a ever so slight devaluation; if you multiply that by the billions of poor pieces of writing being produced, is it little wonder we're floating in a sea of fetid stench?
There is also the fact that we live in an increasingly Post-literate Society in which people no longer read for pleasure as much as they used to. As a result of this, I suggest that people are voluntarily choosing to become more stupid, through laziness and a refusal to learn anything, which includes the ability to use the written word properly. I also note a decline in numeracy to the point where a lot of people find long division difficult. This is encouraged by a distinctly anti-intellectual, commercial and hedonistic media sludge.
So in answer to the original question, I don't think that "the advent of social networking (Facebook etc) has killed the forum boards" but rather that this an expression of a systemic failure of wider society of which forum boards are a very small cross-section... and the real tragedy is that because society is generally more stupid than it used to be, they won't understand what I just said.
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