Proper punctuation, it seems, is rarely necessary in public life anymore. Nor is it alone. Grammar and handwriting, those other marks of civilized societies so dear to the hearts of primary school teachers are also heading the way of the VCR.

Blame it on e-mail and text messaging. We’re too busy mastering the newest abbreviations to remember “a” before “e.” And, seriously, when was the last time anyone wrote letters by hand anyway? Personally, I still haven’t finished up the stationary set I received as a present when I was fourteen. It’s not that I haven’t been keeping up with my correspondence. It’s just that it’s all computerized now. So should we even care?

It appears that we should. A Facebook group called “I judge you when you use poor grammar” has 242, 475 members as of right now and laments the mix up of “your” and “you’re.” Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was a New York Times bestseller.

It’s kind fo nice to know that we’re not ready to give up on ourselves yet. We’re adults who can put together complete sentences and no amount of unlimited text messaging can ever take that away from us.

Don’t u agree?

So, taking a cue from the New York Times, I thought about what this year’s five Oscar nominees for the best picture category say about the head space Americans are in this year. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Juno: Hilary, Barack, Rudy; in the end, Americans don’t care if their president is black, female or Republican. What really matters is their stance on abortion. The pro-choice vs. pro-life debate has become the metaphorical Berlin wall for Americans, dividing families and ending marriages because of differing values.

2. Atonement: Americans always want to believe they’re fighting the good war. So rather than turning on the news to hear yet again what a big mistake Iraq was, they flocked to the movie theatres to relive World War Two. The fact that the movie is about good looking British people is a mute point.

3. There Will be Blood: Rolling Stone reviewer Peter Travers said this movie was about “the dark underside of the American success story.” No doubt aging boomers and members of the Me Generation are worried that their youthful pursuits of success left the world in bad shape. Will the younger generations come after them for revenge when they’re lying infirm in their nursing home beds or will this movie have a happy ending?

4. No Country for Old Men

: The title of this film suggests more worries for aging boomers but no, it’s about drugs and good old fashioned bloodlust, two things Americans never get tired of hearing about.

5. Michael Clayton: In the wake of what could be a huge economic recession, how long can big business continue to have free rein over the American economy? Who cares! This one stars George Clooney!

She’s received a bit of a modern makeover, of course. According to the Vancouver Sun, a new website starring the spunky literary heroine allows girls to be part of an online community where they can interact with an animated Anne and chat with other girls from around the world.

The best part? A heavily screened registration process keeps the site free from those pesky online predators and pedophiles who strike so much fear into the hearts of parents and law enforcement officials everywhere.

I find it quite fitting that digital Anne feels so adamant about keeping her subscribers safe from the perils of the modern age. After all, she’s been delighting young female audiences since way before any nude photos of that High School Musical girl hit the internet and she does things like baking pies and attending Sunday school! Getting to know Anne is a bit like getting your innocence back, even if it’s online.

Even better, when girls are tired of staring the computer screen, they can read the free copy of Anne of Green Gables they receive in the mail when they register for the site. And when they’re finished that, they can read the new Anne of Green Gables prequel coming out this spring.

Kind of makes you want to bake a pie. You know, after you’ve downloaded a good recipe from the internet.

More importantly, I am hoping that a strike resolution will also bring an end to the conspiracy that is reality television.

It’s scripted, people. Deal with it.

Any professional deserves to receive credit for his or her work. Television writers are justified in demanding recognition for deciding what Lauren and Heidi will say on the Hills each week.

On second thought, if I was writing some of those lines, I don’t think I’d want people to know about it.

In all seriousness, though, I think it’s interesting that we live in a society that is so tweaked and so stylized, yet a fear of admitting that things are not as natural as they seem permeates our culture.

Think about it. We wear coloured contact lenses and eat genetically modified foods and get our daily news fix from heavily edited footage narrated by an airbrushed news anchor.  A lot of work goes into packaging and presentation these days.

Someone has to be first to stand up and admit there’s a puppet pulling the strings.

It’s time to give credit where credit is due.

Pereles argues that the internet age has virtually eliminated privacy and anonymity within our culture. This is particularly the case for celebrities, who now have their every move documented on a minute-by-minute basis thanks to online tabloids but it also applies to the public at large, who choose to put their images out into cyberspace with websites such as facebook and youtube.

The aspect of choice is what makes this phenomenon so interesting. Ours has become a culture of over-exposure but this lack of privacy is not due to any Big Brother type dictatorship. Instead, we are uploading these images and videos onto the internet ourselves and using our online profiles to constantly update and promote our thoughts and feelings to the world.

All of this reminded me of another New York Times article I had read a few months back. In it, the author, Penelope Green, reported on a new school of architects who likened modern city life to a public performance of sort, punctuated by glass-walled condo buildings which display their inhabitants to passer-bys on the street.

I thought that cities were supposed to be where you go if you crave anonymity, the antithesis to small towns where people lean over their fences to chat with their neighbors about what’s new in their lives.

Perhaps we have all just grown weary of a world that has become too big and too impersonal.

Maybe now we just want to lean over one another’s laptop screens and tell our neighbors what we’ve been up to lately.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that some of the campaigning has been alighting on the superficial side.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of debate about health care, abortion, the environment and, of course, terrorism. There have also been some fascinating exchanges on issues of race and gender thanks to the groundbreaking rivalry between Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

 However, it also seems like the candidates for 2008 fancy themselves as entertainers rather than politicians.

First, there were the “Chuck Norris Approved” ads for Mike Huckabee.

Then, Obama poked fun at his friendship with Oprah on Letterman’s top ten.

Should a potential leader of the most powerful country in the world really be engaging in these types of shenanigans?

I’ll admit that you can’t talk about health care all the time and no one is denying that a world leader can have a sense of humour. There’s also the issue of low voter turnout. If people aren’t tuning in to the debates, maybe you do have to get their attention during Letterman.

I just wonder how soundly we’d all sleep at night knowing the president of the United States was voted in on based on his or her potential ability to headline a variety show.

I’m not saying politics shouldn’t be interesting or engaging. I’m simply arguing that politics should ideally be interesting on their own merit, not because they found their way into the prime time lineup.

In the end, these are the people with all the power and we need to know that they reached their positions because of their experience, insight and (hopefully) integrity, not because they entertained us.

A musician with a drug problem? Ho-hum, right? She’s definitely not the first singer whose songs have been fused with lyrics about substance abuse. Type in “celebrity drug overdose” on Wikipedia and you can find a long list of artists who died as a result of their drug habits. The truth is, Winehouse’s behavior is hardly shocking.

The only difference is, if Amy ends up dead on the carpet one day like Judy Garland or Janis Joplin before her, we’ll actually be able to document her fall through tabloid pictures and headlines.

Will we, the public, feel guilty that we watched it happen? Will we feel a sense of discomfort or even a sense of shame that we were essentially along for a deadly ride?

Would her death even be as shocking as Garland’s or Joplin’s? Or would we simply shake our heads and say, “Well, you could see it coming.”

Perhaps it’s not the public’s responsibility. It is strange to be privy to such intimate behavior and yet be so far removed from the source. You almost can’t help but feel disconnected. And is it really so wrong to watch?

What about the media? A recent post on the Gallery of the Absurd website reported that a new tabloid called Celebrity Drugs and Alcohol Weekly was projected to hit newsstands later this year. But publishers would argue that they only sell what the public wants.

I personally would suggest that if the media stopped publishing it, the public wouldn’t miss it, at least not after a while.

In the end, if Winehouse wants to destroy herself with drugs, it’s not up to the public to stop her. After all, she’s the one who sings that “they tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no, no.”

Then there is Juno. In this small budget film about a pregnant 16 year old, the title character and her friends speak with an adult-like weariness about their bodies and their sexual exploits, which are far more complicated and developed than the naïvely taught lessons they receive in sex-ed. The dialogue in this film is similarly punctuated with raunchy vocabulary, albeit with a higher level of sophistication worthy of its indy audience.

Do teenagers actually talk and think like these film teens? Rogan and Goldberg apparently did and perhaps most teenagers today do as well. Sexual Education in school is still important but when it comes to proving teens with a knowledge base about sex, it can’t keep up with the pace set by the internet. Sophisticated media provides teens with sexual material way beyond anything on their school curriculums.

It might be time to accept the fact that the youth of today have lost their innocence. When media broke the story of Jaime-Lynn Spears’s pregnancy, parents of young girls feared that her actions would influence their daughters. But if the movies teach us anything, their daughters have been talking about sex for a while now and with a vocabulary fit for a 30 year old.

Then again, who knows? Juno decides to give her baby up for adoption because she’s not ready to be a parent. “I’m not mature enough to do this yet,” she says. At the end of Superbad, Michael Cera’s character Evan decides he doesn’t want to lose his virginity when he and his date are too drunk to enjoy it. He tells her they should wait for a better time. Then she pukes on him. Teenagers today might speak like adults swapping stories in a locker room but the majority of them are still aware that they’re not as mature as the words they use.

Maybe the kids will be all right.