Digital Technologies have changed the way we communicate.

I have been told that people today cannot write properly because of new technologies. I don't agree with that for these reasons. One, language is not fixed or stable thing. Language has been in a constant state of change over the course of centuries, and new inventions always inspired us to be inventive. 

Two, there is not anything new about today's anxiety about the effectiveness that effects that the new media forms will have on us. In 360 B.C., Plato reported that Socrates was concerned about the forgetfulness that the technology of writing would produce in the souls of those who learned it, and numerous scholars in the 15^th and 16^th centuries expressed concerns about what the result would be of the wide dissemination of texts made possible by print.

Writing certainly changed the ways knowledge was shared, and print made possible its wide distribution, but no one today would say that writing or print made us less able to communicate effectively.  Change often brings fear with it. How we react to change is up to us. Today many people assume
that technologies like texting and Facebook, are causing a deterioration in actual communication skills.

I don't agree with the popular claim that the rise of text messaging will lead to decline in writing skills. New digital technologies are leading us to the new ways of communication, just as the writing and print helped to change the world of sharing ideas.

As 'reading' is not associated only with books, writing is not just putting words on paper anymore. If we continue believing these then it would blind us to what actually is happening in contemporary culture. Just because people are not reading traditional printed books, it does not mean people are not reading anymore. In fact, I can say there are more opportunities for reading today than ever before. Personally, I love books, I love the feel of them on my hand but that does not mean I don't use the internet to accesses more books and materials to read.

I think, rather than producing a decline in writing and writing abilities, digital technology and mobile devices opened up different opportunities and avenues for us to express ourselves even more. Now people can publish blogs, exchange ideas with friends using social networking systems and produce and distribute their own audio and video recording and they can respond to the things that their friends publish as well.

The challenge for all of us is to understand that these modes of online writing with which so many people engage today are writing. Rather than dismissing these digital exchanges as silly or superficial, we should put them to work for us. It might turn out that these new forms provide important benefits for learning today.

The question of audience is paramount. Writing online can allow people to engage with many different audiences, leading to an understanding that the appropriateness of various modes of communication has as much to do with the audience that writing seeks to reach as it does with "correctness" in any narrow sense.

The kinds of abbreviations and slang and, shall we say, creative spelling used in text-messaging with one's friends don't belong in formal presentations of research. This is not because those inventions are wrong, however, but because they're not taking audience into account.

No language has ever been static or singular   Whatever language we speak, we use different kind of words and languages depending on our audiences - the way we talk to our friends and the way we talk to our employers are not the same. The trick is for us to find ways to put those multiple 'language' to work so that we can become as fluent as possible in the many modes of communication available today