Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 18
Posts 1 - 10

I can't be trusted with Google's texting app

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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

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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

Donald Trump Threatens Ted Cruz’s Wife, Eliciting Angry Retort

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.3.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | hashtags, misunderstanding, politics, Twitter
Summary | Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have started a public feud on Twitter over their spouses. Trump thinks that Cruz has used footage of Melania Trump modeling nude for GQ magazine in a commercial against Trump. Trump then threatened to reveal secrets about Heidi Cruz. It turned out the anti-Trump advertisement was not made or paid for by Cruz and Cruz shamed Trump via Twitter for threatening his wife with the hashtag #classless.
Image Description | Image of Ted Cruz speaking with his wife Heidi in the background.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Emojis to grace Pepsi products in summer campaign

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Newspaper | USA Today
Date | 19.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, hashtags, marketing, social media
Summary | Pepsi is using emojis to market their product because it is the "language of today" that transcends cultures and is intellegible for everyone. The new campaign also includes the two hasthags #PepsiMoji and #SayItWithPepsi to encourage consumers to post about their purchase on social media. Coca Cola recently had a similar campaign with first names on their bottles. They had been very successful with making consumers engage with the company through social media. Consumers basically did free marketing for them by posting pictures of Coke bottles with their names on their private accounts.
Image Description | Pepsi bottles with emojis and Coca Cola bottles with first names.
Image Tags | emojis, logo

So, Is That a Thing?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 16.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | language threat, smartphone
Summary | The smartphone keeps us on the running at all times up to the point that we are overflooded with information on a daily basis. No wonder that the phrase "is that a thing?" makes sense to most people today. It is a lazy way to express that something is a significant state of affairs.
Image Description | Collage art abstractly illustrating "a thing" versus "not a thing".
Image Tags | text

Smartphone Era Politics

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | addiction, language threat, research/study, smartphone
Summary | Smartphones are changing everything: the news media, politics, and most fundamentally how humans communicate and connect with one another. A UK study claims that we check our phones over 200 times a day. All the app notifications are addictive. Despite this extensive use of a communication device, we most rarely use it to communicate with one another.
Image Description | N/A

France Plans a New Keyboard to Shift Control to Typists

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 22.1.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | language threat, spelling, word/writing
Summary | The French language is notoriously difficult to write and computer keyboards are not very well suited to facilitate typing for French typists. Important letters and diacritics are oftentimes hidden behind complicated shortcut combinations and discourage people from writing correctly in French. Since keyboards arrived, the false rumor that diacritics can be omitted on capital letters has spread around. Now the French governement is looking into designing a better keyboard standard for French typists.
Image Description | N/A

BBC celebrates the Bard...with emoji website!

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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

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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: Are they changing how we communicate with each other?

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Newspaper | CBC News
Date | 3.4.2016
Language | English
Country | Canada
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, texting
Summary | A professor of new media studies often uses emojis in her texts. She says that they fill a gap in our communication, and that they are a language allowing people to express themselves well via text messages. Using emojis is also informal, fast, and creative. However, other people don't like emojis because they are replacing words. A retired university professor claims that she would rather see people express their feelings with words. The founder of "Emogi" says that emojis are changing (in a good way) the way we communicate. Indeed, emojis allow people to convey things that they wouldn't be able to convey with words alone. Emojis are not destroying language.
Image Description | Image of the 'face with tears of joy' emoji, screenshot of a chat conversation, series of Apple emojis, image of the 'poop emoji', and photograph of the Oxford Dictionary of English next to a cake representing the 'face with tears of joy' emoji.
Image Tags | dictionary, emojis

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