The article was quite well written and seemed to cover a lot of what we tried to do with our first essay. An interesting thing I found comes from the West article Weblogs and literary response, and is used to help explain her reasoning as to why her students are building identity's as "Web Literate communicators":
"All three students seem aware of the expectations of this digital form, which includes an informal style; frequent use of abbreviations and acronyms; and a relaxed stance with respect to standard English grammar, usage, and mechanics. (569)
West makes a strong argument about what it means to be web literate individual and uses the evidence she accrued earlier (various examples of abbreviations and altered spellings of wordz) from the students posts as evidence of their Literacy. But while this does ring true for most communications on line, it also is true that with increasing regularity, "frequent [usage] of abbreviations and acronyms" is likely to get your post ignored outright, and taking to "relaxed [of a] stance with respect to standard English grammar, usage, and mechanics" will often get you banned (Made unable to continue use of a forum, chat service ect.). The web is trying to clean up its image a tad or at least make itself easier to understand, and moderators (modz, The Ban Hammer, ect.) will often not tolerate BS (I am sure you can figure this one out?) posts unless the forum is specifically for such conversations. On the whole though, I do a agree that to be web literate, you must first understand where the web began.. On a completely unrelated tangent, are ellipses (. . .) not the coolest things to use??
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