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Fermin Llosa

Professor Mcgriff

Comp. 1

24 October 2018

The Effect of Technology in the Evolution of Communication

Language and communication are undergoing extreme change, most of it is due to

technology and how accessible it is right now. Our youth is using social media and texting as a

major way to communicate with one another and depending who you are, you see this as

something amusing and innovative or as the reason young people are lacking skills and the death

of the English language as we know it. Of course, there’s up and downs in the revolutionary use

of technology in our day to day lives just like there is in any other subject; but is this a good

change overall? I believe technology is just part of the natural change of language and

communication.

Many issues with the introduction of these changes have been brought up, in “Is Digital

Communication Good or Bad---or Both?” Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff list some of the

complaints from critics of technology’s role in communication. These critics claim that the easily

accessible information and its overwhelming quantity “prevents us from thinking clearly” and

that it has made us “no longer think straight or organize our thoughts into clear writing.” Also,

they reprove of “reductive sound bites and inane abbreviations” like “LOL” (168). And as to

conversations in social media and texting, critics argue they “are rarely genuine meetings of

minds” and that because of the instantaneous effect “communications online tends to undermine
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true conversation because writers can too easily dismiss or ignore other points of view” (169,

170).

But there’s much more than that, John Mcwhorter’s Ted Talk explains how texting is

really writing as we speak. We are writing, yes, but not as we do with essays; we text the way we

chat with our friends: in short sentences. Regarding all the abbreviations, McWhorter claims they

have become “pragmatic particles” just like “yo” or the Canadian “eh.” McWhorter also showed

how the critique of developing languages has been present since 63 A.D., where a man

complains of “the way people are speaking Latin. As it happens, he was writing about what had

become French.”

Even Shakespeare, who wrote dialogue the way they spoke at the moment, gave himself

the freedom to change English a bit the way he seemed more fit. And technology is just one of

these changes, it has given us the tools to explore new possibilities in communication and the

language just changes like it always has. Who knows what language may our descendants speak

centuries in the future.

Finally, I am convinced that we are adapting into new speech; the same way we stopped

talking elegantly like we did centuries ago and like we changed and created new languages and

words, we are constantly transitioning into new ways of talking and writing. With this advances

we are accomplishing long distance communication while still keeping it real; and that, IMHO, is

wonderful.

Works Cited
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Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “Is Digital Communication Good or Bad---or Both?” They

Say/ I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, Third ed., W. W. Norton &

Company, Inc., 2016, pp. 167–172.

McWhorter, John. “Txtng is killing language. JK!!!” TED, February 2013,

www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?language=en.

McWhorter, John. “Is Texting Killing the English Language?” Time, 25 Apr. 2013,

ideas.time.com/2013/04/25/is-texting-killing-the-english-language/.