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analog:
(only some of this is directed at your post, but it is a conveninent place to jump out)
you do not take into account that email and boards like this are developing into a particular genre of writing, with particular assumptions about voice and conventions for expression.
they are, in general, more speech-dominated spaces.
to approximate speech cadences, people simplify or adapt grammar rules that they would adhere to if the genre-space they were writing in was more formal.
that people adapt their mode of writing to different spaces does not at all mean that there is any degradation--it means, rather, that the spaces for deploying english are diversifying.
conversely it makes no sense to assume that you can make judgements about how people write in a more formal space from how they write here.
for what it's worth, i write here in a mode that is closer to email because it helps keep the writing (and my persona) away from a more formal mode, which i use (and teach) in my everyday life.
i do not like capital letters, so here i do not use them.
i remember reading an article by lazlo moholy-nagy, written when he ran the typography workshop at the bauhaus, about the non-functionality of caps in most european languages--i thought he was right--and i simply like the way lines of text look without caps breaking it up.
to compensate for the effects of not using caps, i use dashes or spaces to seperate clauses/sentences.
the typographic usage keeps this space more informal, more like talking--in addition, i simplify my grammar, experimenting with ways to create speech rhythms in this space that are different from how i actually talk.
different genres=the possibility for different kinds of games to be played.
nothing about it is necessarily an index of deterioration.
the matter of experimental literature is another genre-space question. because the opening post did not make this basic distinction, i thought it fair game to go after it from both directions.
usually arguments in defense of "standard" written english are not about genre-specific adaptations of the language--they are more expressions of anxiety, usually class-specific, about the relation of the dominant mode of expression to a dialect that is seen as encroaching on whatever sense of cultural or racial homogeniety people derive from the fact of standarization.
in this kind of debate, the question is different: each argument for the "standard" involves cultural power. it involves (at a remove) the question of domination--the dominant class exercizes its power in the cultural sphere by enforcing its standards for communication on all others.
this kind of conflict is understood best through linguistics-oriented readings of colonialism in various forms--the conflicts between super-and sub-strate, the conflicts between written and oral (see walter ong's work on this)....
so you act as though you are defending some objective standard when in fact you are just as much defending the position of a particular social group to impose its standard as universal.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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