As anyone who knows how to use the internet is aware (and I’m assuming that means a majority of my readers), there is an entire society that has burst into existence in cyberspace. And as anyone who has spent enough time on the internet knows, that society is a horrible, horrible place.

We’ve all heard stories about the level of human indecency that can be achieved when you give a person the ability to communicate with almost anyone in the world while still retaining nearly complete anonymity. There was a man with alleged mental illnesses posting hateful comments on “In Memory Of” videos on YouTube and causing grief to the victims’ loved ones. There was a group of grown men harassing a teenage girl over MySpace because she posted suicidal messages. We can’t forget that the internet is also home to the soulless person who also invented spam e-mails.

This blog is not about them.

Don’t get me wrong, I think all of those things are horrible, but they are isolated incidents. Just like watching a disturbing news story, it doesn’t represent a majority of the human population or even the population of just the United States. They are the bizarre exceptions to the rules we have placed on our society. The problem arises when those exceptions become the rules.

It’s no secret to anyone that knows me that I like video games quite a lot. Specifically, I enjoy playing video games over the internet with random strangers that I have never met and will most likely never speak to again. As anyone who plays video games over the internet or frequents an internet forum or reads YouTube comments will tell you, there is an epidemic of laziness spreading throughout the world.

It probably began at some point when someone realized they could type u instead of you. Then some1 else realized that u could shorten quite a few statements by just takin off a few letters. Or takin out punctuation so that u can save a few precious characters so that it fits in ur text message. All logical conclusions, but that’s when logic ended.

R3plac1n l3tt3rs w1th numb3rs mak3s n0 s3ns3, 1t d03sn’t sh0rt3n a stat3m3nt, 1t mak3s 1t hard3r t0 r3ad. Spelling words differently, such as speshul instead of special, does not shorten them or make it faster. That is literally the same amount of characters and actually took more effort to type because my brain forced me to spend three seconds resisting the spell check prompt.

And it is constantly getting worse. Every time I think I have begun to understand what the current typing convention is a new one is invented that is even more baffling than the last. It has gotten to the point where there is a huge divide between those people who value grammar and spelling and those who have apparently lost the cognitive ability to make sense.

Worse yet, it has leaked into the real world. I recently became friends with someone I met at one of those work parties that you don’t want to go to but do anyways on the off-chance you’ll have fun. We exchanged contact information, presumably so that we could hang out at a later date, and went on our merry ways. She sent me a text message a few days later and I have literally been unable to hold a conversation with her through text messages because she clearly was in some horrible accident the day after and has lost all control of her fingers.

So, that being said, I ask that you take one thing away from this blog: for my sake and the sake of others like me, show some pride in your words. Take that extra two seconds to type out “you”. Go ahead and add a comma, it won’t bite. Go forth and populate the interweb with well thought out YouTube comments and spell checked forum posts. And most of all, please learn to spell before you text me again. I can’t understand a single word of your last one.