Apparently teens and twenty-somethings these days aren’t very good at face-to-face interaction. Yahoo!’s “Working Guy” blogged about the phenomenon as explained by Mark Bauerlein in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece.

The crux of the issue: the prevalence of social media and emailing have made face-to-face contact less necessary and, as a result, young people who send thousands of texts and emails a day are losing the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues when in the company of real live people. This leaves them disconnected from older folks who were taught arcane social graces like “look at the person talking to you.”

The argument may be a bit overdrawn, but Bauerlein’s image of the distracted co-worker who can’t focus on a meeting because his head’s buried in his Blackberry is familiar to office jockeys.

And we’ve probably all avoided an uncomfortable conversation by emailing instead. How about returning a call with an email? That’s a non-verbal cue for “really don’t have the time for/interest in/mental stamina required to talk to you right now.”

Is there a redeeming quality to a quickie text-focused world?

I’d like to emphasize the positive – that texts, Facebook posts, Tweets, blogs, etc. are resurrecting an art form – writing – that decayed in the age of the telephone. But the language used in e-writing isn’t particularly artistic. It’s a bastardized, short-hand, crappy form of English (or whatever language the person composing the message speaks – is there a French equivalent of LMAO?).

And I’m not throwing stones. Even in my own texts, I try to wage a valiant battle on behalf of apostrophes. But sometimes it’s just easier to tap out “dont.”

Furthermore, some of the old benefits of writing – taking the time to organize your thoughts and express them as clearly, concisely, and gracefully as possible – are overridden by the need for speed in modern communications. Texts are concise, yes, but rarely clear, graceful, or well thought out.

So is there any hope for kids growing up in the Twitterverse? They can’t handle direct human contact, their conversation skills are withering, they have no attention span, and the bulk of their writing is shallow, transactional, and barely literate.

If you have any advice, please send it in 140 characters or less.