Are Some People Too Worried About Using Online Language?

This week, I gained some fascinating insights into  (cropped from Netspeak - Search for Words, the best online netspeak dictionary I suppose), a particular language I am using on the Internet, especially on Facebook. I enjoy writing online in English with all kinds of time-saving skills such as minimal use of capitalisation, letter homophones and so on, for example,

. In fact, when I started writing online in English, I hated this kind of style very much, because i thought it was the poison of language inaccuracy.




But soon I realised that it was very tiresome for me to check grammar and spelling, and make sure everything was perfectly fine before I press 'enter', while I was chatting with my friends. That is why now I am using netspeak, or linguistically speaking, internet slang. We can say something like 'It's my bad!' but y cant we write sth like its my bad!!!!!!!!!!?

People cannot say netspeak is really a bad thing because I think this practice is similar to diglossia. We probably use Standard English to write formal or serious things like academic essays (or blogs in our case) and we use English netspeak to write something casual, for instance, while writing online in social networking. Writing too formally on social networking sites may give people a sense of sarcasm.

I would like to share an MSN conversation with my friend with you all:
I:               ive asked her if she can join us :D
My friend: ok but who is ive?
I:               ha ha! ive is i've, i have. its not a name

This conversation is interesting I think but not common. I would say that some people are getting too worried that netspeak worsens our language proficiency. However, we are literate. We somehow unconsciously know when to use the 'appropriate' language to write, for instance, writing 'u r v nice' on paper makes me feel very strange. Besides, language proficiency is not only confined to spelling or Morphology. We also have sentence structure or Syntax, meanings of words or Semantics and so on. From the above conversation, it is conspicuous that I know the contracted from of have is 've, I know how to write a complete sentence and I know the meanings of every word in the conversation. Do all these still mean that my language proficiency is low?

I would like to share a video uploaded by macmillanELT on Youtube. David Crystal, introduced by Christoph, shared his positive views about the language changed by the Internet, and I think what he said goes along with what I was saying. As long as we can communicate with people online happily, I cannot see any problems with netspeak. But bearing this in mind, make sure you and your friends are on the right track when you use netspeak, or else misunderstanding will crop up. :P