Thursday, August 18, 2016
Is It Laziness Or Is It The Technologies Fault?
While reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, the book really makes you see television and media in a whole other perspective, but that's for another post. One of the points or ideas that Postman brought up was about how people talked back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While reading that, it really got me thinking about how different we talk from people back then. English was very proper and well structured back then, but now, all over social media people use abbreviations like "lol" and "smh" and things like that. When people wrote letters, which was the closest thing to texting back then, they didn't abbreviate things like that they used proper grammar and proper English writing. Once technology was introduced as a new way of communication, we slowly became more and more proper and starting abbreviating and contracting words that don't even make sense. Is it because people are getting lazy? Or is it the technologies fault for making us not have to think about proper English anymore and in turn made us less competent on the subject?
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I don't completely agree with you. People started using abbreviations such as "lol" or "gtg" because when texting first came out, it was too tedious to text out the whole word/phrase. Texting or typing on a phone is so much easier nowadays, people have the option to type more formally. (I'm currently typing this comment on my phone). It's not really being lazy, it's just the "in" thing to do. When someone types really formally via text message, it looks a bit weird. We're just so used to using acronyms such as "lol" while texting. I may use acronyms and other things like that, but it doesn't hinder me from using proper English when I need to, and it shouldn't to other people too.
ReplyDeleteI personally think it has to do with technology's affect on our lives. We are not as formal in our writing today as we were during the Age of Print. Technology has allowed us to create acronyms that are universally known by most, thus that is the reason why are discussion is informal. We are certainly capable of writing at the level used during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we choose to use abbreviations to speed up our discourse.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Cheyanne. Just because we use abbreviations doesn't mean we forgot how to write formally. We choose to use those abbreviations. They after all are just a short way of saying something. Some people use them and some don't, but at the end of the day, if we are asked to not use abbreviations many can succeed in using formal language.
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