I thought this was a good topic to bring to bleat.ca because as people draw conclusions and write them down here on the site, others might take offense, or perhaps they might just want to play devil's advocate. Here's what I (and many others) have observed...

Email, forum, or text message based discussions often run the risk of being misinterpreted. Someone offers their opinion on a subject and all of a sudden someone else blasts them and tells them how wrong they are. Next thing you know there's name calling and all the rest.

Here's what got me thinking though. It is my belief that though the written word has been around for a long, long time, there are fewer masters of it's use as there once was. (Wanna hear about my theory? Read this...) Basically, I would conclude that the written word has become too easy to create and send in order to warrant the writer to take care in their writing. Writing become sloppy and mistakes in interpretation are very common.

It is in this issue that we find the problem. There is no longer any sense that you need to get it right the first time because the time it takes to write it is less and there is no person whose time will be wasted by carrying an unclear message to a recipient. People are now able to respond impulsively. We can now read something, misunderstand it, and reply carelessly in mere minutes.

My conclusion? We have employed technology poorly as a society. We have used it not to do what is NEEDED in less time so as to enhance our personal lives. Instead we have used technology as much as POSSIBLE in order to enhance our productivity and income potential. Technology has made it so we can do more work in 8 hours instead of letting technology make work that used to take 8 hours happen in 4 thus giving us time to focus on other life-enhancing things. This push to get faster and faster at things has made us a fast people. You can see it everywhere; you all know what I mean. This has trickled through to our beloved written word and has put a cancer in our word-craft (not for everyone, but for many of us). My only suggestion to combat this is to stop and think before hitting send. Re-read your response. Clarify things that might come off as ambiguous. Take care and pride in your writing as so many did when writing first came on the scene for our species.