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Chelsea Heck Instructor: Malcolm Campbell English 1103 4/26/13 The New Language

Btw (by the way) sol (sooner or later) kids r gonna start 2 write like this in papers. The way they talk online and text will become a habit; a bad habit. The texting lingo will be brought outside the phone and into the world and inside classrooms. According to Shannon Webster, author of the article What Are the Positive & Negative Effects of Using Technology, states Text messaging also has its own language, an abbreviated form of speech that has found its way into classrooms and businesses (Webster). How has technology diminished our social skills and the ways we communicate? Ever since phones with texting and all of these technologies have come out (for example Walkman and CD players to iPods and flip phones into iPhones), the people of this generation have become lazy with the way they communicate. They have become lazy in the way that there are many abbreviations for simple words people do not feel the need to type them all out. For example; b4 (before), gtg (got to go), l8er (later) and brb (be right back). Another example of us becoming lazy with the way we communicate is we would rather send a text message rather than call someone or have a face to face conversation. Technology is not necessarily as terrible as people make it sound; we are just misusing it and taking it for granted. Technology is my native tongue. Im online six hours a day. I have a cell phone, voicemail, fax, laptop, and palmtop. Im connectedand lately, Ive been wondering where all

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this equipment is leading me. Ive found myself asking a question thats both disquieting and intriguing: What kind of person am I becoming as a result of all this stuff? says Howard Rheingold, author of Look Whos Talking (Rheingold). Technology is native tongue to everyone in this generation. We are surrounded by technology everywhere we go. Who will we become and in what ways will technology affect us in years to come? We now also face a new hard challenge; how to say what we want to say in 140 characters or less. This challenge is caused by twitter; it only allows you to say what you want to say in 140 characters. 140 characters is not as much as you think it would be until you start to type; it causes you to make a lot of abbreviations and makes you think more simply to try to get your point across. Back in older generations birds were the only ones that tweeted; now people tweet too. Twitter has become very popular to teens in this generation. But, it has caused people to think more simply and be lazy with the way they talk. Twitter does not just cause people to think more simply; it also gives people a sense of power: Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy, said Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security advisor, who later called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; in Malcolm Gladwells article Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted (Gladwell). Just because they are behind a screen, people feel like they can trash talk anyone. People subtweet about people and twitter causes fights over the internet with two or more people tweeting back and forth to each other expressing themselves in less than 140 characters and abbreviations. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will

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has be upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns, writes Gladwell. (Gladwell) Twitter can be used to pass on up-to-date information quickly. Sometimes Twitter can leave out important information and does not get the point across. Dave Wilcox, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, writes that the coverage on social media points to the need for everyone to be better news consumers as well as producers. He followed events on Twitter and gives the service an A for engagement, and a C- for accuracy (Kiesow). Poynters Vicki Krueger writes that an Associated Press Managing Editors study and webinar suggest questions for developing ethics and credibility standards to be applied to Twitter and Facebook messages as well (Kiesow). Twitter is not a credible source to get news. Subtweets and retweets could get messed up in the time between it was first tweeted till the time you read the tweet. People try to communicate news and have conversations on twitter but it does not have the same effect as a face to face conversation would. Technology has caused less and less f2f (face to face) conversations. Just ten years ago we were the age of the kids of this generation that are being highly affected by this new change of communication. Times have changed; we used to use the landline to call friends for play dates. We would even just walk to a friends house and knock on the door; texting was not even an option of us. People use texting more than making phone calls; and I am in that category. Ever since texting was available I would only text and hate when people called me. I never liked talking on the phone. Most news came to people by word of mouth; now you have multiple options to choose from to get what you want to say out and the last option would be by word of mouth. Mentioned in Earlene Arnetts article, Technology Has Changed the Way We

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Communicate, we used to say; I heard this on the radio but now it is I saw this online (Arnett) Communication is usually face to face and hearing each others voices, but texting made communication go through our fingers. It is clear to see that we rely too much on technology these days. I was one of those kids who put a cell phone on my birthday and Christmas list every year. While kids get cell phones in fourth or fifth grade, I was one of the lasts to get theirs in eighth grade. I was always mad when I never got a phone when everyone else had one, but now that I am older, I understand. I work at an elementary school after care and phones are not allowed. But, of course every day you have those kids who are sneaking their cell phones out to text. We cannot even be away from our phones for more than three hours or we go crazy because we are so used to having it all of the time. What does a child need a cell phone for in third grade? Kids are relying to technology everywhere around them at such a young age. They will never understand the great meaning of go play outside. These days kids hanging out consist of having people over to sit around and play on their phones the whole time, not talking. It is so hard for people these days to not be on their phones; they are attached to their phones. People miss what happens in the world around them because too much time is spent looking down at their phones. Even a one year old is so accustomed to technology she does not know the difference between a magazine and an iPad. It is crazy to think that even magazines and newspapers could become foreign to the generations that follow ours. Usually babies will rip apart magazines and newspapers and make messes, until this one year old came along and got concerned her finger no longer worked since the magazine was not working like an iPad. (Baby)

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( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk ) We have initially thought of technology as being something hard to grasp, understand, and hard to teach, but this video seems to illustrate that that has changed and is no longer the case. Technology is easier to get accustomed to at a younger age, when you are born into it all around you. People are becoming too reliable on technology at such a young age. Technology carries another problem with it too; causing peoples abilities to spell correctly go down the drain. Spell check is a life saver for majority of the people in this generation. iPhones and other smartphones with autocorrect will spell the word correctly for you when you are not even half way done with typing the word. Who needs dictionaries anymore when we have the computer to look up the meaning of a word and autocorrect to figure out the spelling of a word? We all need to be willing to learn and grow with the new technology that comes out every few months. Technology is on the fast track with changing, and changes every six months. If you do not keep up with the fast changing life of technology you will be left in the dust. Text messaging is one of the most popular ways to communicate. Rather than seeing or talking to a person face-to-face, you can talk to a person over the phone at your leisure (Webster). The first text message was sent 20 years ago today, forever changing the ways we communicate (Murphy). In the article, "Text Messaging Turns 20, Has Changed the Way We Communicate, and Slows in the Face of a New Tech Landscape", Joe Murphy states, After checking the time, texting is the second most popular use of a cell phone. Cell phones are one of the useful and most owned pieces of technology. Cell phones are changing with us every year; they are changing and becoming more advanced and skinnier as we get more advanced with technology.

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Cell phones will always be around. In the book, Teaching Generation Text: Using Cell Phones to Enhance Learning by Lisa Nielsen and Willyn Webb, it showed texting in a different perspective. Texting and using a cell phone for communication did not completely change in school. Nielsen and Webb showed that teachers can turn cell phones into educational opportunities and not only distractions. Texting and cell phones can bring communication into the classroom. It can bring a host of innovative ideas, activities, lessons, and strategies into the classroom, says Nielsen (Nielsen). Cell phones can remind students to study, serve as a way to take notes, provide instant, on-demand answers and research, be a great vehicle for home-school connection, and record and capture oral reports or responses to polls and quizzes, all of which can be used to enhance lesson plans and increase motivation (Nielsen). Cell phones can be used as a major influence in helping students incorporate digital technology with their studies. The actions of texting may seem rude under conventional social norms, leading to misunderstandings (Webster). Technology has both positive and negative effects in the business world. The use of technology can be a great help to people in communicating. But technology can have consequences of reducing person-to-person interaction without the device as an intermediary (Webster). Technology is great in many peoples eyes but it is not so great in the work place. The ability to have questions answered immediately allows customer support staff to work faster without irritating the customer. The downside is that employees are less likely to engage in social activities away from their computers. Water cooler talk now takes place by IM, rather than face to face. Many people sit at home talking via IM rather than on the phone or in person. (Webster)

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Another use of technology in the business world is email. Email was one of the first changes in how companies use technology to communicate with individuals. The ability to release information to many different people at once, without calling a meeting or requiring printing of the materials, turned into a money- and time-saving device (Webster). There are both positive and negative effects with emails. The positive sides that come with emails are the reduction of paper cost and the speed that the emails were delivered. The negative side is that more people are spending time on their emails than what they are supposed to be working on. Also, a poorly written email can lead to confusion, rather than clarity, in the workplace (Webster). There are less and less face to face conversations and phones calls. Numbers are used for letters and people are becoming so much lazier with the way they talk. Our generation has had the best of both worlds; we got and get to live through both eras of technology. The technology has many benefits, yes, but we are so reliable on it, no one will know what to do if it ever ends. Technology has effects on social lives, work lives, and communication. People miss what happens in the world around them because too much time is spent looking down at their phones and other technologies. Technology has taken over our lives and has made our lives simpler.

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Works Cited Arnett, Earlene. "Technology Has Changed the Way We Communicate." News-Graphic.com. N.p., 11 Aug. 2012. Web. 23 Feb. 2013.

"Baby Thinks Magazine Is IPad." YouTube. YouTube, 25 June 2012. Web. 6 Mar. 2013.

Gladwell, Malcolm. Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted. The New Yorker, 4 Oct. 2010. Web. 8 Mar. 2013.

Kiesow, Damon. Twitter was an Imperfect News Channel during Giffords Coverage. Poynter.org, 10 Jan. 2011. Web. 8 Mar. 2013.

Murphy, Joe. "Text Messaging Turns 20, Has Changed the Way We Communicate, and Slows in the Face of a New Tech Landscape." Joe Murphy Librarian Innovator RSS. N.p., 3 Dec. 2012. Web. 8 Mar. 2013.

Nielsen, Lisa, and Willyn H. Webb. Teaching Generation Text: Using Cell Phones to Enhance Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011. Print.

Rheingold, Howard. Look Whos Talking. Wired 7.1 (Jan. 1999). Web. 8 Mar. 2013.

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Taylor, T. L. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 92-102. Print.

Webster, Shannon. "What Are the Positive & Negative Effects of Using Technology to Communicate?" Small Business. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Mar. 2013.