Number of Posts: 10
Posts 1 - 10
I can't be trusted with Google's texting app
Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 19.5.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | Google, language threat, texting, word/writing, youth
Summary | Google's new Allo app is supposed to make you save time while you're texing, but it can sometimes lead to misunderstandings. The author of the article doesn't really like emojis and doesn't know how to use them well. She doesn't follow young people's digital habits. Their generation favors brevity, which can have a negative impact on language.
Image Description | Photograph of two young girls on their smartphones, two smartphones displaying chat conversations, and a man standing in front of a screen displaying "Allo" and "Duo".
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone, text
Es postet, also bin ich
(It posts so I am)
Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 19.7.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | brain, emojis, language threat, selfie, social media
Summary | In his new book called "Facebook generation", Roberto Simanowski positions himself between the cultural pessimists and the digital euphorics. He does fear for our language competence and tied to it our memory. We tend to posts selfies and emojis rather than put our feelings into words. We tend to post a link to a song, a video, or an article rather than paraphrase that information make our point in an original sentence. This leads to the degeneration of our language ability and that inability to process information in our own words prevents the creation of memories. Instead we leave a huge digital data trail online.
Image Description | Woman's hands holding a smartphone while using a laptop.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), hand(s), smartphone
Das neue iMessage strapaziert die Nerven
(The new iMessage gets on my nerves)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 15.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, texting, word/writing
Summary | The updated iMessage has tons of new functions. It suggests appropriate emojis to replace words of a message, it now has sticker packages like the Facebook Messenger and allows for text messages to be animated. Users can also send short handwritten Messages - that it if they can still write by hand. All of the updates combined make for a much more obnoxious iMessage service.
Image Description | Images of iPhones using iMessage.
Image Tags | smartphone
Wo geht's hier zur #bikinibridge?
(Which way is the #bikinibridge?)
Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 18.7.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | (mental) health, gender, hashtags, Instagram, threat
Summary | Instagram is the new place where beauty ideals are reproduced and policed. Such hashtags as the #thighgap and the #bikinibridge let users pull up a sea of skinny women's bodies which can be compared with each other. Although these trends are said to be about fitness and health, but the comments and likes show that the trends are more about a beauty ideal. This is misleading and dangerous.
Image Description | Shutterstock Image of a woman in a gym taking a selfie.
Image Tags | female(s), selfie, smartphone
Emoji overload? Why we're ditching yellow smileys in favour of actual words
Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 22.7.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | The author explain why she hates emojis. She dislikes the fact that people can now type a word and replace it with the correspondant emoji. Some technologies have significantly improved our lives, but our emotional communication didn't need to be improved like that, according to the author. Words were fine; there is no need to regress back to "hieroglyphics".
Image Description | Photograph of a young woman smiling and looking at her phone.
Image Tags | female(s), smartphone
¿Limitan los emoticonos nuestra capacidad de expresión?
(Do emojis limit our capacity to express ourselves?)
Newspaper | El País
Date | 27.10.2016
Language | Spanish
Country | Spain
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, translation
Summary | The fact that Fred Benenson translated Moby Dick in emojis actually reflects the importance of emojis in today's society. Our keyboards can already offer emoji alternatives to written words. After thousands of years of progress, are we regressing back to the Egyptian time? Some people fear that the rise of emoji might limit our capacity to express ourselves and lead us to simplicity. Those who defend emojis claim that they are the natural result of the evolution of communication.
Image Description | Photograph of a hand holding a smartphone; on the screen there is a text conversation with emojis
Image Tags | emojis, hand(s), smartphone, text
That time when ‘that time when’ took over the Internet #InstantNostalgia
Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 15.9.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | hashtags, research/study, social media
Summary | It has become customary to frame anecdotal posts on social media with the phrase "that time when" or "that akward moment when". Sometimes it is even used to describe events that have just happened, even though it is a formulation that suggests an old memory. This linguistic strategy thereby creates an air of nostalgia around the memory and makes it iconic. Linguists suggest that the usage of the demonstrative "that" suggests that sender and receiver of the message have shared memories. This is why many celebrities use this construction to create a false sense of intimacy with their fans online.
Image Description | GIF of a woman taking a selfie and posting it to social media.
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, smartphone, social media
Abusar de los "Emojis": ¿el nuevo enemigo del lenguaje?
(Abusing emojis: the new enemy of language?)
Newspaper | infobae
Date | 13.1.2016
Language | Spanish
Country | Argentina
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, youth
Summary | An Instagram study revealed that emojis are becoming more popular and are replacing words in messages. Linguist Silvia Ramirez Gelbes claims that using emojis allows users to say something very precise in one click -whereas using words would take longer. Are emojis detrimental to written language? According to the linguist, emojis are not harmful and they are not a "youth phenomenon".
Image Description | Photograph of a man (head cut off) holding a selfie stick and taking a selfie; he is also wearing five emoji medals around his neck.
Image Tags | emojis, male(s), selfie stick, smartphone
Digitale Bilderflut: Raubt uns nicht die Phantasie!
(Digital image flood: Don’t rob us of our imagination!)
Newspaper | Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)
Date | 9.7.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, WhatsApp
Summary | New messaging apps make it really easy to send snapshots and users have increasingly conventionalized the inclusion of image material in their messages. The image material is usually a quick snap of the situation the sender is in (morning coffee, etc.) or of something the sender is messaging about (herb garden, etc.), as if to provide evidence of their actually experiencing/doing something. Some voices now proclaim the replacement of language by images but the same prognosis was made in the mid-19th century when postcards were invented. What might suffer by our inflationary sharing of photographs is our imagination.
Image Description | Photograph of adults taking pictures of the Mona Lisa; the shot mostly shows hands and three smartphones.
Image Tags | hand(s), smartphone
Junge schreiben - mehr als je zuvor
(Young people write – more than ever)
Newspaper | St. Galler Tagblatt
Date | 29.1.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, smartphone, texting, word/writing, youth
Summary | Ever since the Swiss youth did poorly in the PISA survey of 2000, critics have been blaming new technologies for deteriorating young people's linguistic skills. English literature lecturer Mario Andreotti however outlines that today's teens write more than previous generations, albeit less formally, because they use their phones to write rather than talk. Because texting does not follow the rigid formal rules of writing but rather is just spoken discourse written down, some experts assume that these relaxed writing habits may worsen students’ writing skills in general.
Image Description | Photograph of three teenagers who are not interacting: two of them are looking at their phones.
Image Tags | male(s), smartphone
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