Is Micro-blogging degrading the English language?

We're all well aware that micro blogging has taken the ‘net by storm lately with the introduction of Twitter and similar services.

There are also now appliances (Microblogging Appliance Delivers a Twitter for your Intranet) that have been created in order to help expand micro-blogging into the corporate environment.  It's also well known that people already use acronyms, mis-spellings, word replacements and other means to communicate without using the actual correct language itself.

This has led us to wonder if perhaps micro blogging and other similar tools such as instant messaging have begun to lead to an even further degradation of the human language.  Is this the case or are we simple evolving speech wise?

Slang seems to be becoming more prevalent today then it once was. So much so, in fact, that we sometimes notice slang terms being used in business meetings as if they were actual dictionary words.