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How Is Digital Technology Changing Our Interactions With Each Other?

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How Is Digital Technology Changing Our Interactions With Each Other?

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Technology has lead to many advances in communication between friends family and strangers but as a result it has significantly decreased how much we interact with each other IRL on a daily basis

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Learn how digital technology is changing the ways we interact—and how a BS in Psychology can prepare you for a career in this modern landscape.

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How Is Digital Technology Changing Our Interactions With Each Other?

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How Is Digital Technology Changing Our Interactions With Each Other?

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Technology has lead to many advances in communication between friends family and strangers but as a result it has significantly decreased how much we interact with each other IRL on a daily basis

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Learn how digital technology is changing the ways we interact—and how a BS in Psychology can prepare you for a career in this modern landscape.

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THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE WORDS WE USE

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THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE WORDS WE USE

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technology has changed the way we communicate in many ways most of which we don't even think about such as using all caps when angry or using abbreviations and shortening words, examples being "BRB" and "Uuu2" meaning Beright back and what you up to respectively

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It's a funny old business, being a technology copywriter.

At first, these words appear to be opposites: a world of quills, pretentious beard stroking and earthy Chesterfields slammed up against silicone chips and flashing mainframes. But delve a little deeper, and you'll find the two worlds complement each other in weird and fascinating ways.

Now, I'm aware that not all of you see technology's impact on language as wholly positive. Indeed, many polyglot purists view technology as downright corrosive, vehemently wagging their tongues at the emojis and 'textspeak' they feel have invaded their mother tongue.

Such ways of speaking, they feel, are lazy, uncouth, even vulgar.

But I ask you, dear reader, to suspend your disdain for just a few moments. Because in this short article, I hope to convince you that technology is evolving language in a wholly healthy and natural way, and the changes we see are part of a linguistic tradition that started at the very beginning of written communication.

Language through the ages

If there is one thing I'd like to leave you with, it's this: technology has always shaped language use.

Let's not forget that writing is itself a technology. When our ancestors first started engraving cave walls, they'd invented something spectacular: a method of taking fleeting, ephemeral sounds that disappeared in the air, and communicating them in a way that would endure literally thousands of years.

From there, history has repeatedly shown the implement or surface of a given communication tool has a huge impact on language - particularly writing: take the stiff, straight lines of cuneiform script chiselled into stone tablets, or flowing Chinese characters painted with a brush. Both technologies changed the very look and feel of their respective languages.

Years passed. Empires rose and fell. Brushes and chisels evolved into quills, and a new mongrel language called English became the latest to adopt an obscure, 3000-year-old set of ancient Phoenician characters to express itself: the alphabet.

The arrival of the printing press (1440) went beyond quills, bringing with it graphical contrasts such as bold and italic, the art form of typography, and of course upper and lower cases; so named after the physical cases the letters were stored in - capitals in the 'upper' part of the case, small letters in the 'lower' part.

(Incidentally, it brought with it new forms of punctuation, some of which we sadly no long use: the interrobang (?) for example, which today we present rather blandly as '!?'; and a colon followed by a hyphen (:-), nicknamed the 'dog's bollocks', which would pleasingly go on to give us one of our favourite British phrases.)

Printing technology also give us a whole set of new conventions for spelling, spacing, line-breaking, and hyphenating. Doubtless, tongues were set a-wagging at just how much traditional language had been ripped up. But the purists were defeated by the sheer pragmatism the technology afforded.

The 19 th century brought its own innovations: the telegraph, the typewriter, the Word Document yours truly is using this very moment. And while I've been concentrating on written English, the ability to transmit voice over distances brought a slew of spoken conventions: the exchange of greetings over a phone line, the enthusiastic patter of a radio sports commentary, the formal clarity of a TV news announcer.

Queen's English rose to prominence as 'standard English', with dialect forms dismissed as lazy, uncouth and even vulgar (remind you of anything?)

In the space of a few paragraphs we've travelled 5500 years. And as I hope you can see, the theme remains the same throughout the whole of human history: new mediums bring with them new written conventions, new graphical features, new rules, new expressions, new ways of talking. For all the weight we give them, words are specs of flotsam undulating on the great sea of human progress; churned, channelled and shaped by the society and technology around it.

And as we broke into the 21 st century, that undulating sea was about to become a whirlpool.

Enter the internet

Hopefully, with the above chronology, you can see how English has never been fixed. It's always morphed and changed with the times. And from that perspective, the internet is simply the next step in a completely natural evolution.

It's beyond the scope of this article to distil all the features of digital communication. After all, the internet is home to an ever-increasing set of sub-mediums, ranging from email to Snapchat to chatbots. There are however prominent features that we associate with 'netspeak'.

Many of these are so obvious, we barely think about them. The various neologisms we coin for example, by creating a compound of two words. Things like software, podcast, email and cybercrime. These examples also neatly demonstrate the popular prefixes and affixes that are used. Things like -ware, cyber- and e-.

Capitalisation has also gone through a radical shift. Most informal online communication throws out steadfast rules set out by the 14 th century printing presses. Looking at my phone now, I can see these beauties (incidentally, not written by me).

'where are you?'
'im going to asda.
'i dunno. you?

Capitalisation for proper nouns, the start of sentences, and the singular first person pronoun are simply not needed. Yet capitalisation does have a use. BiCaps for example, which you will be instantly familiar with if you look at eBay, iPhone, AskJeeves, or any other words that have a capital beyond the first letter.

We also now use capitals in a more emotive way. 'WHERE ARE YOU???!' an angry mother may WhatsApp their teen son/daughter if they stay out too late. Notice too the overuse of questions marks (perhaps a sly interrobang(?) would have been more efficient?).

You would never see a sentence like this in 'standard' writing. And perhaps that's just the point: informal digital communication isn't 'standard'. In many ways, texting, emailing and instant messaging has more in common with spoken English than written. It has a rawness and immediacy that simply doesn't come when, for example, one is slogging through the third draft of this blog.

And it's not just capitals. The old rules of writing, set down hundreds of years before we had computers, are simply too inflexible for the digital world. In order to convey the immediacy and personality of a conversation in written form, rules need to be broken.

'I *really* hate him'
'arghhh wtf'
'Shut. Up.'
'Hey bae wuu2?'

And I haven't even got into the divisive world of emojis (which incidentally has an interesting etymology of its own: rather than deriving from the English word 'emotion', it comes from the Japanese words 'e' (picture) + 'moji' (character), and dates back as far as 1999! But the effect of globalisation on English is a topic for another blog.)

Basic emojis (or emoticons) follow exactly the same principle as the above: they're a way of bending and distorting a language's standard set of graphological features in order to express new ideas and convey new emotion. The standard fare have been around since the days of texting:

But a quick search of the internet will find you some amazing creations. Nowadays phones will include sets of pictorial emojis that act as script and can be inserted into written communications, but the function is still the same as those traditional emoticons: it's a way of embellishing, evolving, and equipping written language to convey things that letters alone simply cannot.

I could go on. But the point I want to leave you with is that the language we see online is in no way a degeneration of what has come before. Written communication has evolved from something used to count grains of wheat through to ancient legal documents, recording stories, sharing the news, and now a digital supplement to speech. In each case, humans had to bend, change and create in order for language to express what was needed.

And in fact, there has never been a 'standard' English. Shakespeare himself spelt his name multiple different ways - sometimes even on the same document! Of course, we do need some form of standardisation (I'm as annoyed as the next copywriter at businesses who can't spell right.) But unlike France, who actively fights anglicized loanwords like 'software', 'Walkman' and 'email' in favour of original French words, we don't have an academy that tries to police what comes and goes out of our language.

English has a proud tradition of being a democratic language - one where influences come and go not because they are officially ordained from above, but because they are in common use. The OED does not tell you what is or isn't allowed: it simply provides a snapshot of the common parlance at that particular time.

So, with all that in mind, I say embrace the chaos. Slather your texts in emojis. Split infinites in your tweets. Use capitals in your work emails until everyone hates you. And most of all, use words to do what they have always been designed to do - to express yourself.

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The impact of technology on the words we use - Harvard

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Technology is evolving language in a wholly healthy and natural way, and the changes we see are part of a linguistic tradition

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How Has the Internet Affected the Way We Communicate Within This New Era? Can We Use This to Our Advantage?

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How Has the Internet Affected the Way We Communicate Within This New Era? Can We Use This to Our Advantage?

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The internet has both helped and hindered us at the same time leading to advances in communication but also leading to the spread of misinformation, predators, stalkers, and the regression back to things like widespread propaganda that can be spread everywhere with the click of a button.

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How Has the Internet Affected the Way We Communicate Within This New Era? Can We Use This to Our Advantage?

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How Has the Internet Affected the Way We Communicate Within This New Era? Can We Use This to Our Advantage?

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The internet has both helped and hindered us at the same time leading to advances in communication but also leading to the spread of misinformation, predators, stalkers, and the regression back to things like widespread propaganda that can be spread everywhere with the click of a button.

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Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet

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Conversation and Technology: From the Telephone to the Internet

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technology has had a profound impact on society, leading to the world changing b/c of it but this force has neither helped nor hindered our communication as it leads to a balancing act between helpful and harmful

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We live in a world where social interaction is increasingly mediated by technological devices. In this book, Ian Hutchby explores the impact these technologies have on our attempts to communicate. Focusing on four examples - telephones, computerized expert systems at work, speech-based systems dealing with enquiries from the public, and multi-user spaces on the Internet - Hutchby asks: are we increasingly technologized conversationalists, or is technology increasingly conversationalized? Conversation and Technology draws on recent theory and empirical research in conversation analysis, ethnomethodology and the social construction of technology. In novel contributions to each of these areas, Hutchby argues that the ways in which we interact can be profoundly shaped by technological media, while at the same time we ourselves are shapers of both the cultural and interactional properties of these technologies. The book begins by examining a variety of theoretical perspectives on this issue. Hutchby offers a critical appraisal of recent sociological thinking, which has tended to over-estimate society’s influence on technological development. Instead he calls for a new appreciation of the relationship between human communication and technology. Using a range of case studies to illustrate his argument, Hutchby explores the multiplicity of ways in which technology affects our ordinary conversational practices. Readers in areas as diverse as sociology, communication studies, psychology, computer science and management studies will find much of interest in this account of the human and communicative properties of various forms of modern communication technology.

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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

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Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

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the internet has had a profound effect on the way speak but that's not necessarily a bad thing has the human langue is a ever evolving ever changing thing. b/c of this langue evolving to include abbreviations or shortened words is not good or bad just different.

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!! Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Amazon, and The Washington Post A Wired Must-Read Book of Summer “Gretchen McCulloch is the internet’s favorite linguist, and this book is essential reading. Reading her work is like suddenly being able to see the matrix.” —Jonny Sun, author of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are. Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of comments and @replies. Linguistically inventive online communities spread new slang and jargon with dizzying speed. What’s more, social media is a vast laboratory of unedited, unfiltered words where we can watch language evolve in real time. Even the most absurd-looking slang has genuine patterns behind it. Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch explores the deep forces that shape human language and influence the way we communicate with one another. She explains how your first social internet experience influences whether you prefer “LOL” or “lol,” why ~sparkly tildes~ succeeded where centuries of proposals for irony punctuation had failed, what emoji have in common with physical gestures, and how the artfully disarrayed language of animal memes like lolcats and doggo made them more likely to spread.

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technology has significantly helped the spread of ideas, sparked conversations between 'strangers', and even made people fall in love. but as with most things there is always the 'cost'. You may text with someone for hours on end, but despite that you don't feel like you 'know' them well enough to talk IRL

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Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World

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Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World

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the words we use before the introduction of the internet and modern technology is very different to after it.

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In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back “whatever” attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are “always on” one technology or another--whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games--we have to ask what kind of people do we become, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media? Our 300-year-old written culture is on the verge of redefinition, Baron notes. It’s up to us to determine how and when we use language technologies, and to weigh the personal and social benefits--and costs--of being “always on.” This engaging and lucidly-crafted book gives us the tools for taking on these challenges.