Regarding technology and the younger generation...

I felt the desire to make another post about language recently. Nothing quite as philosophical as the last, but something on my mind nonetheless. Apologies to those who don't find this kind of thing interesting. Anyway, my thoughts here come in response to a post I read on a (admittedly politically-charged) news site. In a nutshell, the article expressed a sentiment that, really, could be applied well beyond language and has been around all my life: the all-too-common view that some older people express which essentially states younger generations are damning the world. 

The idea in the post was that technology, particularly smartphones and texting, is destroying the younger generation's notions of correct spelling and grammatical usage. 

Here's the thing, though: this problem has existed well before the emergence of smartphones and widespread internet use. It's almost as if, at a certain age, many people in America just stop caring about the intricacies of the language.

This isn't a young vs. old comparison, either. I've tutored countless people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who claimed to have excellent grammatical skills but just "couldn't understand why their English professors were all so nit-picky." You know, with "silly" little things like subject-verb agreement and fragmented sentences. I even had one older guy tell me once that "English didn't work that way when I was in school" to defend his comma splicing problem.

That said, I'll be one of the first to admit that there are certainly outdated and arbitrary rules within the English language today, and I don't take grammar quite as seriously as most of the people I know. I'm simply noting that, based on my own experiences as a mere observer and tutor, technology is certainly changing the ball field, but whether or not it is worsening the language as a whole has yet to be seen.