Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 87
Posts 81 - 87

How to Listen to Donald Trump Every Day for Years

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 21.1.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | grammar, language threat, politics, texting, Twitter
Summary | President Trump is widely criticized for his poor speaking abilities. His speaking style is more akin to regular talking whereas presidential speaking traditionally resembles the written language. This explains why Trump's medium of choice is Twitter or 'speeches' (too linguistically informal to be called an actual speech). Twitter, with its limitation on message length resembles texting, which as linguists have confirmed mimicks spoken language rather than formal writing.
Image Description | Donald Trump on a stage being photographed.
Image Tags | camera, male(s)

Facebook Could Be Associated With a Longer Life, Study Finds

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 31.10.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, Facebook, research/study
Summary | A recent study about longevity shows that moderate Facebook activity correlates with better health and hence a longer life. Previous research shows that an active social life in general (so offline) also correlates with longevity. Because the results however only attast to correlation and not necessarily to a causal connection, it could also be that healthier people are just more social online and offline and not that sociability has an effect on health. It has been confirmed that a rich social life makes people happier while excessive Facebook use leads to people being unhappy.
Image Description | Woman instructing old man using a computer.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Snap Makes a Bet on the Cultural Supremacy of the Camera

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 8.3.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | GIFs, language threat, Snapchat
Summary | Snapchat is showing us the future: communication is switching to more visual modes of communication such as photographs, videos, GIFs, funny filters. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch has argued that Snapchat filters constitute a new mode of phatic communication. We have seen the primacy of text gradually broken up in the past decade. This does not mean, however, that the written language will disappear altogether. Text is still very important for conveying accurate information concisely.
Image Description | GIF with anthropomorphic cameras and emojis dancing around.
Image Tags | camera, emojis, gifs

Redefining 'Hot': The Dictionary

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 12.2.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | social media, word/writing
Summary | Dictionaries have entered the sphere of social media. They are marking presence with 'word-of-the-day-tweets' and thereby often reflecting on the political climate of the day. Though they claim to be apolitical, many such dictionary posts are criticized for being biased comments on politics, for instance when Trump's tweets are used to exemplify the word 'paralogize' (to draw conclusions from unrelated evidence). The internet and social media have revolutionized dictionaries in enabling them to conduct empirical lexicography since they are now provided with never-ending data to show them new commonly used words in context. Some new dictionary entries even use GIFs to illustrate the meaning of new words like for the word 'facepalm'.
Image Description | Cartoon about 'discarded books'.

Now Hiring Coders With a Flair for the Continental Breakfast

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 14.2.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | marketing, smartphone, social media
Summary | New technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in the hospitality industry: contemporary guests want to make their reservations and check in via their smartphones rather than in person. Hotels are beginning to hire their own in-house tech staff for digital development. Parking spaces are administrated digitally, guest WiFi is expected to function well and be safe - some are even planning to replace room keys with face recognition software upon entering a hotel room.
Image Description | Image of hotel employees outside the entrance with tablets.
Image Tags | male(s), tablet

Ask Alexa? No, Hear This Alexa

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 16.1.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, threat
Summary | Amazon's new chatbot Alexa is constructed to make life easier for us: it is an assistant that gets you the information you need or fetches (orders) groceries for you. You can operated without hands by simply calling "Alexa" and the microphone and speaker station will 'wake up' to follow your instruction. But while the artificial intelligence bot learns to be more humanoid from us, we are likely to lose human interactional abilities if we start speaking with robots on regular basis.
Image Description | Image of the Echo devices (microphone and speaker station for Alexa) in a storage unit.
Image Tags | speaker

Snapchat Discover Takes a Hard Line on Misleading and Explicit Images

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 23.1.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | Snapchat, threat, youth
Summary | Snapchat is making greater ethical demands to news publishers on the Discover page. News media posting on Snapchat's Discover page are asked to only post material that is fact-checked and objective and to refrain from using sexually explicit or violent images that are not newsworthy for shock value. In response to a complaint about minors being exposed to inapproriate material on Snapchat, Snapchat ask media outlets who publish on their platform to put age-restrictions on their posts so that mature content is only seen by people who have signed up as adults on Snapchat.
Image Description | Screenshot of the Snapchat Discover page.
Image Tags | smartphone, Snapchat

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