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Amongst the other fast-eroding buffer zones in the Internet age are those between white and blue collar, literati and illiterati and the skilled and unskilled in the workforce.

Indeed the government tells us that quite soon there won't be any employment opportunities available for unskilled individuals. As our education system is unlikely to improve at the same pace as technology, we can look forward to a era of mass-fudging.

People that went to grammar schools appear to find the intrusion by patently incompetent writers into the world of written communication particularly irritating, hinting at the end of civilisation as we know it. In days gone by the verbally-untalented were out of sight and out of mind (and importantly, out of print). Today of course many are proud PC owners with jobs to do and opinions to share. We should not however assume that their collective impact on our culture will be one of decadence. Conventions and formal styles do decay, but often enough new forms emerge to suit the new conditions, thereby forestalling chaos.

Thanks to the Real Academia and a half-century of fascist dictatorship, Castellano has been standadised as right proper Spanish. The broadcast media have had the same effect across the old world - standardisation. The new media on the other hand are allowing regional (or niche) variation to get some traction again. In Spain spelling is an aspect of identity politics, so the kind of abbreviations used in text messaging or chat rooms reflect not only the need to minimise the intricate finger gymnastics, but also the desire to express local sensibility and 'accent' through the medium of electronic text.

In contrast the anglophonic are unusually obsessed with correct form, something that may even be holding us back culturally. Peter Carey may have won the Booker prize a few years ago with a minimally-punctuated novel, but I'd wager that most of this year's entries were written and proofed according to accepted usage in this country. Yet pick up the last-translated works of Nobel Prize winners José Saramago and Gabriel García Márquez (The Double and Memories of my Melancholy Whores) and you will quickly have a sense of what we might be missing out on.

How very British Adam Mars Jones was in his criticism of The Double:

"The sentences may not always be long, but the paragraphs certainly are. A large minority of pages contain no paragraph breaks. Any visual relief that might be provided by dialogue is denied by the device of embedding it in the prose, with only a capital letter to denote shift of speaker. The reader hungers for the piquancy of a single inverted comma...The accelerated pace of speech within the prose format make the eye stumble. Overall, the physical experience of reading The Double is of living in a house without windows."

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