Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 38
Posts 11 - 20

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.
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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.
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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.
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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

Are Emoticons And Emojis Destroying Our Language?

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Newspaper | Huffington Post
Date | 13.8.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | Emojis are popular, especially among young people. Older people are a little worried about that; emojis may harm our language. Two young female interviewees talk about the new set of emojis that just came out and how happy they are. Emoji is a universal language; everyone can understand it. What does that mean for the future of language? It seems that after years of progress, we're regressing back to the age of hieroglyphics.
Image Description | Digital image of four yellow-face emojis, and photograph of a passage of "Emoji Dick" in emoji.
Image Tags | emojis

Will emoji become a new language?

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Newspaper | BBC News
Date | 13.10.2015
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | emojis, grammar, language threat
Summary | Linguist Neil Cohn explains why emojis cannot be considered a new language and why they shouldn't be seen as a threat to language. Emojis don't have the same characteristics as other languages. Emojis are used to complement words, as we would use gestures along speech. Sometimes, people use long sequences of emojis to communicate, but they are not a language since they lack a grammar. Cohn talks about his book The Visual Language of Comics and explains what visual languages are. The visual language of comics does not work the same way as emojis; it's a language that has a grammar.
Image Description | Photograph of a series of emojis on a screen, photograph of a hand gesture, sreenshots of text message conversations with emojis, and photograph of a library of comic books.
Image Tags | emojis, hand(s), smartphone, text

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

Can a GIF Work Better Than Words?

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.9.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, GIFs, language threat, word/writing
Summary | An interviewee claims that using GIFs allows her to express complex feelings and emotions in a a couple seconds. GIFs are becoming more and more popular (i.e. on Facebook, Tumblr, etc.). Words and emojis are becoming old-fashioned.
Image Description | GIF representing three men looking at their smartphone.
Image Tags | gifs, male(s), smartphone

Emojis: The death of the written language?

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Newspaper | CNBC
Date | 24.6.2015
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, misunderstanding, word/writing
Summary | People are using more and more emojis, which can be seen as a threat to written language. Indeed, people are starting to replace words with emojis in order to communicate a feeling or emotion, and according to the author of the article, this is worrying. Moreover, using emojis can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. Finally, if school start to incorporate emojis in their curriculum, it can be perceived as a regress back to hierogylphics.
Image Description | Getty image of a keyboard composed of emojis, and image of a series of Apple emojis representing diversity.
Image Tags | emojis, keyboard

School apologises for 'slut-shaming' prom posters about 'appropriate' dresses suggesting women 'to blame' for rape

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Newspaper | Mirror
Date | 31.3.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | gender, hashtags, school, social media, Twitter
Summary | A Florida school was widely criticized online after a student shared posters that were put up in the school depicting what appropriate women's prom dresses look like and what kind of dresses are inappropriate. These posters were labeled with "good girl". The outrage is around the mysoginist language (degrading women to girls) and the mere fact that women's styling of their bodies is strongly policed and tied to accountability in sexual harrassment cases. The internet responded with a hashtag on Twitter with many contributions and the school's administration has since apologized.
Image Description | Image of the school, the original tweet with the posters, then tweets with students wearing woman symbol t-shirts in protest.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s), school, Twitter

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