Number of Posts: 47
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
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
Donald Trump Threatens Ted Cruz’s Wife, Eliciting Angry Retort
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
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?
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
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
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
Lehrer schreiben Manifest gegen verrohte Schüler
(Teachers write a manifesto against brutal language)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 6.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | brain, cyberbullying, language threat, school, social media, youth
Summary | Many German schools now report an increase in vulgar hate language among the students. They see the cause in the increased amount of hate language online on social media. This leads to less tolerance towards people with other opinions and more aggressive discussions. Neurological psychologists say that violent language influences the brain so that individuals who are exposed to it more readily use physical violence against others.
Image Description | N/A
Afro-Frisur einer Schülerin wird zum Politikum
(Afro hair of a student becomes a political issue)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 2.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | diversity, Facebook, gender, hashtags, politics, school, Twitter
Summary | A black girl at a high school in Pretoria in South Africa was chastised for wearing her hair naturally in an afro. This resulted in a lot of backlash against the school on social media under the hasthag #StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh. As many as 28'000 people signed an online petition to end racism at schools and major polititians condemned the chastising of wearing natural black hair.
Image Description | A black woman doing another black woman's hair in a salon.
Image Tags | female(s)
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
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