Blame our spelling on spellcheck

Excellent point that I never thought of made by Cara Powers. She comments:
"I blame it on spellcheck. I almost never look anything up anymore. I don't even think about spelling when I type. I just give it a go and watch for the little red underline."
. Yes, Cara you are right, I forgot completely about spellcheck as I never use it but basically you do not need to be able to spell. The software will do it for you. So things would seem to point to the fact that our ability to spell may be rendered redundant by the Internet. This may be true when writing online but what happens when you have to write a letter, fill in a form when there is no computer available? Or do you think we will reach the situation where all our written communication is done online or by computer and spelling should no longer be our concern? Could happen but ....
I firmly believe that language is closely connected to our culture and is in fact to some degree a mirror of our culture. An inability to spell also indicates that we are losing the connection to where words come from. It is interesting to note, for example, that 51 802 words in the English language are derived from the Greek language. I firmly believe we should never lose interest in the roots of our language - ultimately we will become all the poorer for this.

Mr Google I cannot spell

Off topic again but a story which I think is one which may have some truth and which I find of interest - and from a source which is not a sensationalist one - the Economist. It claims in this week's edition that google, sites like facebook and twitter are having a disastrous effect upon the spelling ability of our children. This set me thinking and basically I came to the conclusion that I have never seen as many misspellings in my life as on the Internet. I have been made consciously aware over the past years that the average level of spelling on the Net is poor. But is this the fault of the Internet? I believe not.
While I do agree that if you are confronted constantly with bad spelling then you will never learn how to spell a word properly if 9 times out of ten you see it misspelt. But I do not believe that it is at fault, I think we must look first and foremost at our school systems. I came from the old system where every night in elementary school I had to learn to spell 20 words. This is a exercise which I think today has vanished from the school curriculum.
Of course, to be fair they are individuals who would also claim that many of us learn visually and that if we are constantly confronted with a common mispelling we will assume eventually that this is the correct spelling. I have no argument to counter this as I do believe that we all learn in very different ways. Yet the social networking sites I visit are mainly populated by adults like myself and they did not learn to spell or misspell only through their use of the Internet in the past ten years.