As I’ve mentioned before, my 87-year-old grandmother is my blog’s most loyal reader. Today she emailed me this prompt. I’m curious to hear what you think.

My grandma in the scarf I sent her from Mongolia, with a festive cable car this December in San Francisco. Thanks mama for the picture :)

Grandma Ginny writes:

Something I just read:

Your generation with its blogs is looser, briefer and less grammatical in writing, and less deep in the thoughts and emotions behind it. The art of language, the beauty of language, is being lost. Comments, please.

I have mixed feelings about this statement.

This week I turned 27. We, Generation Y, have spent our entire academic and professional careers online. I remember the first time I used the Internet, for a 6th-grade Spanish project. I used my dad’s AOL account to look up a recipe for Chicken Mole from Sunset Magazine.

Blogs, as a medium, allow for complete flexibility. You can write whatever you want, truth (or, to borrow a Stephen Colbert-ism “truthiness“) and post it for the world to see. After all sorts of watch-out-what-you-post scares (the Cisco fatty, this adman who advises potential employees to buy a diary, the smear campaign against Krystal Ball, etc.) my friends and I are very conscious of what we post online.

(That said, there are some pictures on this site that could be taken out of context if someone really wanted to. The same could be said of any photo anywhere.)

Yes, it can be loose, and brief, and less grammatically-correct than our high school English teachers might have wanted, but that does not mean it’s lacking in true thoughts and emotions.

Twitter, with its 140-character limit, challenges us to communicate real meaning in a tiny space. This “real meaning” means different things to different people: sharing news, connecting with like-minded people, staying in touch with far-flung friends, mocking prominent journalists, raising money for good causes, etc. Relaxed spelling and grammar allow this meaning to fit within the limits of the medium. And this is creative connection, not something that should inspire panic.

(Sidenote: I’ve been off Twitter for months, behind the Great Firewall. But I like the tool, and I’ll be back on soon.)

I think people will always have deep thoughts and emotions, and always use the written word to communicate these. The blog is an excellent medium to showcase the art of language, the beauty of language, in an accessible form that invites instant feedback.

Yes, many people blog hastily, to share information (or rant!), without paying too much attention to making their language beautiful. But that could be said of many other forms of communication too.

Unlike traditional media, in which pieces are commissioned, selected, and edited to fit agendas that may or may not match those of the writer, blogs allow anyone to share ideas. Even though I might not agree with what many of these bloggers have to say, this self-expression, in itself, could be considered art.

What do you think?