ENGL 680M: New Media

So instead of grading papers or doing my dishes or saving the world...and since Wendy is too busy playing WoW to talk to me on the phone, I've been seeing what's new on the Internet today. There's lots of stuff out there, People, you should go!

Anyway, as I often do I was checking out I Can Has Cheez Burger, which is a very funny site should you be into the silly captions of animals caught on film. In looking around the site I came across a short "essay" , if you will, about the history of lol language and such. It's kinda interesting. I learned a lot from it. Really! So I thought I'd post a link to it here. What I find fascinating is that McCraney (the author) is discussing the development of lol language--mistakes and all--from a linguistic(based) perspective. There's something kind of meta-awareness about this writing being posted on a site that does what the writing is about....not something I find in pop-culture usually.

I got to thinking about some of the conversations I've heard/read/had in the last several years about what text messaging and instant messaging is doing to English...and language in general. I'm wondering what you all think about that, but also what relationship txt spk has to rhetoric. Do we think of txt rhet?

Is text speak a fad like Valley Girl talk was? Are we witnessing a giant leap in language evolution?

McCraney mentioned that some lol language/text speak has become standardized to some extent and that now there are "standard" images appearing to convey ideas, too. I find this fascinating.

We're language people....what do we think about this stuff?