Albert Mehrabian, an Armenian psychologist, argued that only 7% of human communication is made up of the words that we say. He believed that the other 93% is made up of prosodic and paralinguistic features: the way that we use our voices and bodies when we communicate. When communicating via digital media, we compensate that 93% by using: emoji’s, over use of punctuation and abbreviations etc. we do this to express the way we are feeling and talking in our written communication. Since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, these types of communication have started to change the way we speak and communicate and some argue it is wrecking our Standard English language known as ‘the Queen’s English’ as our modern day and age develops.
SMS messaging was used for the first time on 3rd December 1992, when Neil Papworth sent the text message “Merry Christmas”. When communicating via text, I usually talk to my close friends and family. The language I use differs depending on who I’m talking to; this is shown in the text I sent Sam. In this text that I sent, I included elements of both Standard English and ‘text talk’. This language incorporates the sociolect of the modern teenager and is shown when I use the informal ‘oi mate’, instead of using a much more formal ‘hello’, which I would in a face-to-face situation. I have also used an emoji’s, ‘’, this symbolises that I’m not happy that I will be late and creates an affectionate tone to say that I’m sorry, within the text that I sent. I have also included some Standard English within my text, which is shown when I use the phrase, ‘I am going to be late’, instead of abbreviating it to much less formal, ‘I’m gonna b late’. It used to be that people abbreviated there texts because they had to create a message within a certain amount of characters, if they didn’t want to pay an exceed amount of money. Now with our modern technology, people have unlimited texts and characters, but we still abbreviate the same amount; if not more than we used to. Texting has revolutionised the way we communicate and has been abused by some certain people, to look brave and hard behind their phone. Personally I change the way I speak behind my phone and texting, but not in a way to make myself look good, but instead I change the way I would speak compared to how I would in real-life. A study from the British Journal of Development psychology, stats that ‘text speak, rather than harming literacy, could have a positive effect on the way children interact with language’. This shows that some texting could help people with communication and language when learning Standard English. However John Sutherland’s quote feels differently about this subject and says, ‘texting masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness’. I agree with this quote more than I do with the other one because, you may think someone is abbreviating a word when in actual fact they are most likely trying to spell that word but not succeeding.
Twitter was established in March 2006 by Evan Williams, Noah Glass and Jack Dorsey. This mode of digital communication returned to the limited character messaging started by SMS. Due to this, social communication resumed using brevity devices in their ‘tweets’. Popularised by celebrities such as Stephan Fry, twitter has become a global network, connecting users through words that they use. As twitter is growing more people are connecting via this global network and many people use different language when communicating, but there is one use of language nearly everyone includes when, ‘tweeting’. Tweets often contain ‘hashtags’ which automatically links others who are following you, to tweets related on the same subject. Similarly, you can also use the ‘@’ symbol to aim your tweets at a direct person; this is known as direct message. In my first example of a tweet, ‘yes then LADS!!!!! We won 3-0 and r now TOP OF THE LEAGUE!!!!! Cmon #happy #topoftheleague #football’, we can see over use of