Facebook: An innocent method for communication or the downfall of the American education system?

The internet is full of social networking sites where people can reconnect with old friends and make new ones. But with this power comes great responsibility to ignore the over-powering urge to dump all the random facts of the day into an update, even though no one in the world gives a damn, and all of it is of course misspelled. But though the world must be informed on all the minute details of your day, I dont know how I could have slept tonight not knowing that you did find a pair of leopard print shoes for only $39.95 at the mall. Even though Facebook bugs the crap out of me, I was okay with it as long as it stayed in that little corner of the internet and left those of us with a brain alone. But now this culture of thought dumping misspelled crap is starting to spill into the academic world, threatening to poison the well of mankinds knowledge. As I go about my day on a college campus I find that my fellow students cant be bothered to read anything longer than 140 characters, and that the syntax used on Facebook, Twitter and Google + is finding its way into papers and articles written for school. Some professors even encourage this practice, claiming that it is the way things are changing, that it is the future. Some even design course content to prepare students to use these sites to communicate with others. Yes this skill is important, it is not necessary to be taught especially in the college classroom. Yet even as the times change and people adapt with those changes, the need for complex, layered communication that explain processes, relationships and conjecture remains. Human beings have constructed detailed and thoughtful physical and mental structures, and remain capable of doing so. These detailed and thoughtful structures demand verbal and written communication that reflects their nature. Such communication is not possible within the limits of 140 characters or to suffer the fate of being buried among commerce masking itself as friend updates. Though Facebook was key in the organization of the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, and it is true that neither movement would have been a large as they where without Facebook. But mass protests have been organized in the past without these sites, such as the 1964 march on Washington, Woodstock and the Whiskey rebellion of 1789. So Facebook is not essential to organizing a protest. Also the choppy incomplete sentences used on Facebook where not used to describe the protests in our time, nor will they be used to describe these events historically. Though Facebook was a tool of protest it will not be used to describe the outcomes of these protests. The language and the rhetoric used on these social networking sites have no place in society other then the social networking sites. The idea that academic thought can be condensed into a tweet or update is not only obscured but is threatening if applied.