>If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in

>If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication. I would argue that the people who would have written like 50 years ago just never had the opportunity or audience that people do today. Except maybe in a Letter to the Editor of a newspaper or something. So many more people are expressing themselves in public than ever were able to 50 years ago so I think it just seems that people have become less literate than they were. So many YouTube comments and Facebook posts that never would have occurred 50 years ago. It's a democratization of the broadcasting of expression more than literacy decline.