“You make some good points. Got to say, though, that seeing the twitter and message slang like r, cu, lol, and others is to me like fingernails on a blackboard. I have resisted going with the flow with just a couple exceptions: I have been known to use btw and iirc. But I think that’s about the extent of my corruption. I do hope that ghetto slang doesn’t catch on in serious communications. My children and I message daily on our phones using full English while a contemporary of mine uses the common abbreviations.”
Part is context. There’s a reason posting on Free Republic is less formal than, say, legal writing. Different contexts. Texting is difficult (at least for me with my big thumbs) and abbreviations are the natural result of that. Of course, the usages of texting bleed over into other writing. So, we see “BTW” “OTOH” and the like on FR all the time. But we do not see it in formal writing. Eventually, perhaps, we will. Perhaps b4 we expect it.
The same thing with email letters, they are conversational. Those letters look/read nothing like my correspondence, business letters, etc.
(I must admit to the constant use of the comma splice in my posts, email -- I am typing what I hear in my head as though I'm speaking it, and I tend to use a hellalot of commas rather than the full stop period, begin another sentence style.)