I have no doubt that the current generation are far more educated on average than us oldies, but its not in English.
Textspeak works fine for text, although I would argue that with older phones, it was more useful than it is now. With older phones, you had to hit the number 1 three times for a 'c' and if you wanted a double 'cc' then you had to pause between letters. It's expedient to create a form of shorthand in that situation, and textspeak certainly had its place.
With more modern phones however, with full qwerty keyboards and far more advanced predictive abilities ( and auto spell correction! ) there is really no excuse for not bothering to use actual English, when holding a written conversation in English.
My 15 year old is currently planning her career as a naval nurse. She has perfectly acceptable marks at school, and I have no doubt she will succeed gaining entry to her chosen University ( when she finally chooses it ) but her spelling and grammar are atrocious, and her mathematics skills aren't much better.
How she is passing those subjects with reasonable marks is beyond me, I am sure the bar has been lowered considerably over the years.
I don't particularly object to the poor English used in this forum, be it spelling or grammar. I can read netspeak quite well, and its a car forum, not an English class. It concerns me that many can't speak or write their native language correctly any more, but it's not my problem except in the case of my own kids.
I think the biggest problem I have with some posts in here is the famed walloftext.
A few well placed full stops and the use of paragraphing in particular make a long diatribe substantially easier to digest. It only takes a few seconds to edit a post into paragraphs, and makes a major difference in its readability.
