Number of Posts: 9
Posts 1 - 9
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
Under-5s glued to screens 4 hours each day
Newspaper | Daily Mail (UK)
Date | 16.11.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | (mental) health, addiction, childhood, language threat, threat
Summary | Children are spending more than 4 hours a day on screens and are becoming addicted to screens. We should be worried about that. It seems that spending time online prevents children from developping vital social, motor, and communication skills.
Image Description | N/A
BBC celebrates the Bard...with emoji website!
Newspaper | Daily Mail (UK)
Date | 22.1.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | The BBC wants to introduce Shakespeare to the Millennials while using emojis. However, people have been complaining and accusing the BBC of dumbing down Shakespeare's work for young people. On the website that the BBC launched, when people choose an emoji, one of Shakespeare's quotes appear. The quote is supposed to express the same feeling as the emoji.
Image Description | N/A
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
Emojis on council tax bills: Council puts crying face on residents' statements
Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 14.12.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, law, politeness
Summary | Lambeth citizens are getting emojis on their tax correspondence with their local authorities. To be exact: crying face emojis. One resident tweeted her tax calculations with a crying face emoji next to het balance due. Many find this distasteful since many people struggle to pay their taxes and emojis are just inappropriate for government communication. Emojis are one of the fastest growing languages ever recorded in history and they have surpassed their precursors, Egyptian hieroglyphs, which took centuries to develop.
Image Description | Tweet showing the tax document with emoji.
Image Tags | emojis, Twitter
'I don't think people are going to talk': Kanye West says everyone will communicate through emojis in the future as 'words get in the way'
Newspaper | Mail Online
Date | 21.11.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | Kanye West thinks that people won't talk anymore in the future; they will use other (visual) means such as signs, emojis, or body language.
Image Description | Photograph of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)
How good is your grammar? Take the quiz
Newspaper | The Independent
Date | 16.2.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | childhood, grammar, language threat, research/study, school, texting, threat, youth
Summary | According to a study, texting can have a bad impact on young people's use of grammar. The results show that the more people text, the lower their score on the test was. There is also a correlation between the use of adaptations (e.g. gr8 for great) and a lower score. If parents text their kids with a lot of adaptations, the kids will probably imitate their parents.
Image Description | Photograph of a page of a dictionary where the word "grammar" is in sharp focus.
Image Tags | dictionary
GIF Rapt
Newspaper | The Independent
Date | 6.4.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | GIFs, language threat, smartphone, threat
Summary | According to the author of the article, GIFs are becoming a new language. We don't need words to communicate; in today's society, people prefer sending short clips. Why are GIFs so popular? Smartphones may be the reason. We don't use smartphones to think and spend too much time reading/writing long texts. We use them to get to the point, and GIFs are convenient if we want to communicate quickly. People don't need words anymore; they can type a word and choose the relevant GIFs they want to attach to their messages. Every generation considers each new medium as a threat to humanity (e.g. writing, TV, Twitter, etc.). Still, the author claims that we seem to be heading towards a word-less culture.
Image Description | N/A
:) them or :( them, emojis make our messages feel more like us
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 14.6.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | Some people are happy about the new 'emojify' feature that Apple offers, and some people don't like it and think that future generations won't be able to understand the English language. Famous cognitivist Stephen Pinker argues in favor of such communicative features; people adapt their language to the medium they use. If people text or tweet, it doesn't mean they won't be able to communicate in other ways; the same holds true for emojis. Emojis are useful to convey information that is hard to transmit via text (e.g. tone of voice, facial expressions). Having representative emojis (e.g. different skin colors) is also important since they help construct users' identity. Some people are not totally happy with the set of emojis offered now; they still convey certain ideologies and norms (e.g. about gender).
Image Description | Photograph of a woman in a room full of emojis; she has a big 'smiling face with sunglasses emoji' on her head.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s)
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