Tobold, en passant, makes a great point:
We live in an age where people write as much as never before in the history of mankind: text messages, e-mails, blogs, game chats. And it turns out that one of the reasons why many people didn't write so much in previous ages is that they don't know how. They still don't know how, but somehow the social inhibition ... has become lost.
They simply claim that "u" and "r" are just socially acceptable short forms of "you" and "are", mix in some newly invented slang like "roxxor" and "pwn", some acronyms like "lol", and soon the phrases they're writing looks so unlike correct English that nobody even notices that they just spelled a couple of words wrong, and have no idea of the correct use of punctuation.
I hadn't considered the hugely increased use of the written form amongst a wider section of the population. I was aware that i conduct a lot of my interactions in writing, mainly through emails. Those, however, merely replaced the letters I used to churn out in the eighties and early nineties (when enough of my friends started getting email addresses to make that viable). But people who, after leaving school, only wrote in Christmas cards and official forms now communicate widely in textual form.
And they're not very good at it. Partly through lack of practise; partly because of an unwillingness to read widely enough to absorb correct use of language. But Tobold is right: at the heart of the matter is a reluctance to accept that there are good and bad ways to use language. Depressingly many people claim that "r u rdy" is as valid a form of language as "are you ready?" I have heard that the subjunctive is making a small comeback in some quarters: I would that it were more obvious. In the main, written language is devolving as those perfectly capable of writing well are disinhibited by constant exposure to sloppily-constructed emails and 10-character, verb free text-messages, and become drawn into the habit of using abbreviated terms and discarding or abusing potentially vital punctuation (not least the comma). The resulting inexactitude will lead to misunderstanding. That's all very well when arranging where to meet that night, but rather less excusable when stating user requirements for a civil-engineering project.
Not to mention that it's horrible to read.