Discourse that is sometimes off course

I got a glimpse recently into the discourse of the 21st century. It's both fascinating and troubling.

The glimpse came through YouTube, the on-line video posting service. YouTube gives you the opportunity to make your videos available for everyone to see, and everyone in turn has the opportunity to rate and comment on your offering.

What I saw was fascinating in how immediate and wide-ranging the commentary can be. It was troubling in that most of the discussion was done in grammar shorthand that almost requires a translation dictionary. It was additionally troubling in the fact that some of the discussion was so inane.

Here's a little background: I recently purchased a Flip Mino camcorder. It's small and very easy to use, records to an internal memory -- no tapes, no memory cards to insert and extract. You can shoot a video and easily transfer it by way of a USB connection to your computer, then easily upload to YouTube or other video-sharing web sites.

I took my new gizmo to Fenway Park in Boston for the Aug. 30 game between the Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels. This was the week the trade rumors regarding Sox left fielder and slugger Manny Ramirez were at a fever pitch with the trade deadline set to expire the next afternoon. I took video of the crowd doing "the wave" and singing "Sweet Caroline" during the middle of the eighth inning. During the Red Sox half of the eighth it dawned on me it could be the last at-bat for Ramirez as a member of the Red Sox.

So I recorded the at-bat, which ended as a fly-out, and sure enough the next day Manny was traded to the L.A. Dodgers. I posted the Manny video on YouTube and over the next several days watched as the number of views grew and grew.

This Manny video and was not record-breaking content by any means. As of this writing, my view count was up to about 3,800. Some videos generate hundreds of thousands of views. One current video of some guy in China using telephone touch pads to play piano music is up to almost 500,000.

The fact that it generated that much viewer interest was amusing. The fact that a video prompted wide-ranging discussion involving Boston vs. Los Angeles sports, the Boston vs. New York rivalry, and Ramirez's potential Baseball Hall of Fame credentials was a real eye opener. The Manny video has 70 comments attached to it.

But here's the but:

What am I to make of: "yaya wat ev!!!!" Or: "And if ur not a laker fan which team u voting 4?"

I know it's all part of the new keyboard shorthand, but I'm old school when it comes to communicating -- I believe in writing in complete sentences, in emails and on the BlackBerry. One writer talked of Manny being "indicted" into the Hall of Fame. My temptation as the video poster was not to join in the conversation to talk of the merits of Manny going into the Hall of Fame; my temptation was as a former newspaper editor to discourage poor usage and tell the writer that someone is "inducted" not "indicted" into the Hall of Fame.

The discourse contained some troubling profanity and an occasional racial or lifestyle epithet. I didn't interpret the epithets as being meant to harm; they were meant to emphasize a point but were still inappropriate no matter their context.

I come from a generation of writing on paper and in middle age made the migration to the bits and bytes of online. But certain rules that guided me on paper guide me online, as does writing behavior.

It's an unedited and anything-goes online universe. The good news is that it generates discourse that is often impassioned and reasoned; the bad news is that u r left 2 wondering how much of it will degenerate into shorthand rants that ultimately will dissolve from discourse to babble.