Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 3
Posts 1 - 3

What Happened to Who?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | abbreviations, grammar, language threat, politics, Twitter
Summary | More and more politicians have begun replacing the relative pronoun "who" with "that" in sentences like ''people that come with a legal visa and overstay''. Although some dictionaries say this is an acceptable for, the New York Times' style sheet does not condone using "that" instead of "who". It denies the mentioned persons their humanity. This trend is unsurprising considering that our communication is increasingly happening on platforms like Twitter that only allow 140 characters so that we invent loads of abbreviations like "LOL" and "TTYL".
Image Description | Artwork copying Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and a few high-profile Tweets with spelling mistakes.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), Twitter

Eines der reichsten Länder knausert beim Bildungswesen

(One of the wealthiest countries is stingy about education)

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Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 19.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | abbreviations, childhood, language threat, school, threat
Summary | Children nowadays get a smartphone as soon as they are physically able to hold one and spend their whole lives in an artificial, digital environment. All information is at their finger tips, they only need to know how to read. They mix languages and use more and more abbreviations. To top it off: the goverments cuts money from education.
Image Description | N/A

Kommunikation ist alles

(Communication is everything)

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Newspaper | Frankfurter Neue Presse
Date | 4.2.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | abbreviations, childhood, language threat, smartphone
Summary | Many young children already have smartphones. It is problematic if youths spend too much time on new media - they don't learn how to interact face-to-face so that they whip out the phone even if they are hanging out with a friend. They increasingly write in abbreviations which makes them do badly in school. Parents are part of the problem, because they demand that their children be available on the smartphone at all times. It is important to give children positive offline experiences.
Image Description | Image of a man holding a cell phone and holding his thumb up.
Image Tags | cell phone, hand(s), male(s)

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