Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 11
Posts 1 - 10

Weißt du, was diese Emojis wirklich bedeuten?

(Do you know what these emojis really mean?)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 30.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | emojis, misunderstanding, punctuation, texting
Summary | We cannot imagine texting nowadays without emojis. They have become as important to us as punctuation. They serve to add a specific tone to our messages or to present them in a specific light. They are however also very easy to misunderstand. Do we really know what the emojis stand for? Here is an emoji quiz to text your emoji literacy!
Image Description | Artsy photograph of women texting and using emojis, a GIF, and emojis.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s), gifs, smartphone

Doppelte Zeichenzahl bei Twitter? Nicht für Donald Trump

(Doubled number of characters for Twitter? Not for Donald Trump)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 28.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | politics, texting, threat, Twitter
Summary | Twitter has announced that they will be testing a doubled 280 characters limit per tweet with a small test group. The 140 character limit is a remnant of Twitter's text-message related past and they have considered expanding it before, now they finally test it. The expansion of the character limit is meant to apply to all languages except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean because these languages already require less characters to express more content. Multiple Twitter users already panicked on Twitter saying that nothing can stop an international conflict if Donald Trump gets twice as much space on Twitter now. Twitter however confirmed that @realDonaldTrump is not included in the small test group.
Image Description | A screenshot of @realDonaldTrump's profile and a tweet about the new 280 character limit.
Image Tags | female(s), hashtag, male(s), Twitter

Dad confiscates daughter's iPhone - then makes punishment even worse with savage joke

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Newspaper | Mirror
Date | 9.7.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | smartphone, texting, youth
Summary | One dad punished his daughter and confiscating her iPhone. He also made a joke and slid a piece of paper under her door; he actually drew a picture of a smartphone screen displaying text messages between his daugher and himself.
Image Description | Photograph of a girl using her phone, screenshots of several tweets (one of them shows the piece of paper), and photograph of a dad and his daughter.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), smartphone, Twitter

Darauf können sich auch alte iPhone-Nutzer jetzt freuen

(This is what even old iPhone users can look forward to)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 19.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, emojis, smartphone, texting, translation, WhatsApp
Summary | The new iPhone operational system has a couple of new updates. There will be a new control unit and user surface making the iPhone increasingly similar to a full Mac. The in-house messenger iMessage has a lot of new emojis and stickers and allows the users to be more creative with their texting. It is however still no threat to WhatsApp because only Apple users can use iMessage. Siri no also speaks a bunch of new languages: she will be able to translate English into German, Chinese, Spanish, French or Italian.
Image Description | A screenshot of iOS 11.
Image Tags | female(s), smartphone

The dangerous teenage texting slang that all parents should be aware of

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Newspaper | Mirror
Date | 12.6.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | texting, threat, youth
Summary | Young people are always creating new "texting language". Parents should try to keep track of this language evolution, because the online world can be dangerous. A chief parent officer of software program Bark said that she's still surprised that some parents don't know what Netflix and chill’ means -it means sex. Different surveillance softwares help parents to keep an eye their children's texting habits. For instance, Bark is a surveillance software that can recognize when kids are joking and when they are serious.
Image Description | Three photographs of young girls on their smartphones.
Image Tags | female(s), smartphone

iOS 11 - Diese 11 neuen Features solltest du kennen

(iOS 11 - you should know these 11 new features)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 22.9.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | smartphone, texting
Summary | The Apple operational system iOS 11 is meant for iPhones and iPads. It has a lot of new functions, like a screen recording function, or a one-handed texting function where the keyboard is slightly shifted to the right for people who only want to text with one thumb. Other features include a new control center and other changes to the user surface as well as a way to save GIFs.
Image Description | Getty images of a man presenting iOS 11 and a woman using a smartphone, screenshots showing the iOS 11 user surface, and tweets about the new iOS 11 features, some with GIFs.
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, male(s), smartphone, Twitter

Liebesgeschichte, Heldenreise, Flachwitze, Kacke

(Love story, a hero's journey, flat jokes, poop)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 2.8.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | childhood, emojis, marketing, smartphone, texting, threat, youth
Summary | The new emoji movie for children is an animated film starring emojis as its main protagonists. Critics find it quite distasteful because it is full of casual advertising for major tech companies and because it does not address the danger of the internet at all. In Textopolis, the world in which emojis live, alphabetic letters are depicted as elderly with walking canes because the youth does not use letters anymore.
Image Description | Screenshots from the Emoji movie.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s), male(s)

Why Kids Can't Write

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 2.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | grammar, punctuation, school, smartphone, social media, spelling, texting, threat, word/writing
Summary | Many students struggle with writing despite various pedagogical models that have been implemented in past years to tackle that perpetual issue. This is all the more suprising considering that today's students may do moret voluntary writing than any generation before it. They text and post on social media a lot but the writing register is different there. The format's main principle is shortness so grammar, spelling, and punctuation take a back seat.
Image Description | GIF of a hand writing and a group of teachers in a workshop.
Image Tags | female(s), gifs, text

Mit SMS zum Suizid gedrängt – Junge Frau muss 15 Monate ins Gefängnis

(Pressured to commit suicide with SMS - young woman get 15 months prison)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 4.8.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | (mental) health, law, texting, youth
Summary | A young woman has been sentenced to 15 months in prison for pressuring her ex-boyfriend to commit suicide via text messages. Although she was not physically involved in helping with his suicide, the woman is held accountable for encouraging him and not calling the police when she knew he was about to commit suicide.
Image Description | Image of a woman crying.
Image Tags | female(s)

«Jemandem zu sagen, er solle sich ficken, ist ziemlich schlimm»

(«Telling soeone to go fuck himself is pretty bad»)

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 5.4.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | anglicisms, language threat, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | Linguist Elisabeth Stark is research texting communication with a corpus of 18000 text messages and even more WhatsApp messages. She says that about 2-3% of the words are anglicisms and that their amount does not seem to be rising rapidly - the word "fuck" for instance is still too strong for most German speakers. In German, sex is too taboo for taboo language. Her data also shows that Swiss people choose the local dialect rather than the standard variety when texting. Most people's langugage competencies are not compromised by this informal communication, most can adhere to conventions when a formal register is appropriate.
Image Description | Portrait of the interviewee and a Keystone image of a protest with a sign reading "fuck".
Image Tags | female(s), text

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