Number of Posts: 19
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
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
Dieser Chatbot reserviert den Tisch fürs Abendessen
(This chatbot makes dinner reservations)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 27.7.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, Facebook, language threat, youth
Summary | Facebook messenger now has the chatbot Botmio on offer which lets users make dinner reservations at restaurants. This is perfect for younger generations who are reluctant to pick up the phone to call a human to make a reservation - digital natives are "language lazy". They would rather just make a reservation online without interacting with another human.
Image Description | A hand holding a smartphone using a Facebook chatbot and a portrait of the Botmio inventer.
Image Tags | Facebook, hand(s), male(s), smartphone
Smartphones können Spracherwerb bei Kindern behindern
(Smartphones can hinder the language learning of children)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 15.6.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | childhood, language threat, smartphone
Summary | Children learn language by being interacted with and spoken with. Smartphones can get in the way of that, say when a parent waits for the bus with their child. Before smartphones, the parent would comment on the surroundings and interact with the child. Now, the parent might check their messages and pass up a valuable learning opportunity for their child.
Image Description | A hand holding a smartphone.
Image Tags | hand(s), smartphone
Die Frau, die ungewollt mit Emojis ein Haus mietete
(The woman who inadvertently rented a house with emojis)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 24.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, law, misunderstanding
Summary | The debate around whether emojis count as words or seriously meaningful content is very heated - not only in academics but also in law. The Oxford English dictionary only reheated that fire by choosing an emoji as word of the year. Multiple law cases have centered on misunderstandings around emoji use, most recently a case where a woman indicated interest in renting a house with emojis (flamenco dancer, dancer girls, squirrel, comet, a victory sign, and a bottle of Champagne). The house owner sued her for using misleading emojis after she decided not to rent the house after all.
Image Description | An image of a woman's hand holding a smartphone and picking out an emoji and a portrait of the Israely judge who worked on the emoji case.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s), hand(s), male(s), smartphone
Das neue iMessage strapaziert die Nerven
(The new iMessage gets on my nerves)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 15.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, texting, word/writing
Summary | The updated iMessage has tons of new functions. It suggests appropriate emojis to replace words of a message, it now has sticker packages like the Facebook Messenger and allows for text messages to be animated. Users can also send short handwritten Messages - that it if they can still write by hand. All of the updates combined make for a much more obnoxious iMessage service.
Image Description | Images of iPhones using iMessage.
Image Tags | smartphone
Wo geht's hier zur #bikinibridge?
(Which way is the #bikinibridge?)
Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 18.7.2016
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | (mental) health, gender, hashtags, Instagram, threat
Summary | Instagram is the new place where beauty ideals are reproduced and policed. Such hashtags as the #thighgap and the #bikinibridge let users pull up a sea of skinny women's bodies which can be compared with each other. Although these trends are said to be about fitness and health, but the comments and likes show that the trends are more about a beauty ideal. This is misleading and dangerous.
Image Description | Shutterstock Image of a woman in a gym taking a selfie.
Image Tags | female(s), selfie, smartphone
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
¿Limitan los emoticonos nuestra capacidad de expresión?
(Do emojis limit our capacity to express ourselves?)
Newspaper | El País
Date | 27.10.2016
Language | Spanish
Country | Spain
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, translation
Summary | The fact that Fred Benenson translated Moby Dick in emojis actually reflects the importance of emojis in today's society. Our keyboards can already offer emoji alternatives to written words. After thousands of years of progress, are we regressing back to the Egyptian time? Some people fear that the rise of emoji might limit our capacity to express ourselves and lead us to simplicity. Those who defend emojis claim that they are the natural result of the evolution of communication.
Image Description | Photograph of a hand holding a smartphone; on the screen there is a text conversation with emojis
Image Tags | emojis, hand(s), smartphone, text
Will emoji become a new language?
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
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