Electronic literacy narrative

Txuci Lee       

Mr. Hennes

Eng 191-17

09/01/2012

Words

I have had many experiences with reading and writing online and with a computer and laptop. But, the one that sticks out to me the most is when I was a kid I remember looking at my cousin’s MySpace page.  And it struck me that a lot of people online do not write proper.  They write in shorter terms and words than what they would if they wrote an essay or paragraph for school.

I can actually remember seeing it more than once before that, but I think I was too young to actually realize and care that it was going on. Until one day, like I just remember that my cousin was writing a comment to a girl and he didn’t use any proper ending of the word and he shortened many terms.  I can’t actually remember what was said but I can recall the things he did. For instance he used “lol”, “u”, ‘wtf’, and other terms instead of just writing it out. I asked him why don’t you just write it and he said because it’s shorter which doesn’t take up as much time and meaning that you get to chat/ comment faster with the other person. I finally realized why you would want to chat or comment to a person faster because you want to socialize as much as possible and get to know that person or catch up with that person.  It made a lot of sense to me then and now.

Probably one of the main reason why this memory sticks out to me the most is because I somewhat thought that maybe you should talk to girls like that if you want to “get” them. And, it did kind of work. Well, depends on what your meaning of “get” is. I would be on MySpace and this site called asiantown, which was like the Asian MySpace and I would be on it all day just chatting with friends and girls that I’ve just recently met online. As I grew older I learned more in school and how to write proper and use terms and use my punctuation marks better. I still chose to write like in shorter terms because it’s faster. I only chose to write like this on the social networking sites mostly because people actually know the meaning of the terms that you are using.  If they understand then there is really no point of spelling out a whole word or whole sentences to tell them.

So what I realized is that on the social networking sites a lot of the younger users do not write as proper as an older crowd would or as they would in school.  In the social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter not too much people care for “proper” writing; I’ll vouch as one of them.  Those sites are more for like communicating with family and friends rather than writing a proper sentence or paragraph to talk to them. I feel that on a blogging website or on a website that is made for writing and reading then that’s why and when you should and could write properly.  The reason being because that’s where people would critique your writing more harshly than they would as say Facebook. Your friends are not going to make fun of you if you don’t spell something incorrectly or use shorten terms to say what you want faster and more efficiently. As you get older though, you tend to not write in those shorter terms even on social networking network.
            I learned that the world and people around me are in common with the way that we write on social networking sites. The Internet’s language is completely its own. The younger generation is more familiar with it compare to the older. A teenager from the U.S. can relate to a kid from South Africa with how they write on the Internet more specifically on the social networking sites by understanding what each other are saying in their writing online.  Everyone in the social networking sites that uses that “internet” language are in common, we do not write perfect sentences every time we comment or chat with a friend. Therefore we’re all using the internet language knowing and some of us not knowing, but we are still going back to that shorter way of communicating. To be more precise and faster in what we want to say. We can only be precise if the receiving end understands those shorten terms and words. If, they do then communication can become even faster than it is now.

  Not my first experience but the one that I will always remember is when I first learned the Internet’s language through my cousin. I have used it ever since then and still do, though not as much as before. I still write in the shorter terms to communicate with friends and some family who can understand it. It’s been a part of my life ever since my cousin first told me about it and I’m sure it will still be a part for a long time to come. We are all in common when we write the Internet language to communicate with each other.  We tend to write that way so we can communicate faster with the receiving party. Why, do we want to communicate faster? The more time you spend with that person, even on the internet makes the both of you feel better. Socializing even on the internet is a terrific thing, from meeting a new person to catching up. The internet language can bring us all together