An aspect that sort of coincides with my major project, but not exactly is, how the Internet can actually help the large linguistic differences between groups on social media. This idea actually somewhat contradicts parts of my major project, but I thought it would be interesting to provide a different look on this area.
This time I’m not only speaking about the Internet groups that McCulloch describes, but different groups as in generations, gender, economic status, popularity and many more. Before social media, writing was mostly rather formal and one of the few ways to get a vast amount of people to see the writing was for it to be published or in the paper, which wouldn’t happen if someone couldn’t use proper punctuation or grammar.
However, as the Internet evolved in social media, abbreviations and acronyms became widely used, and grammar and punctuation were the least of concerns when writing on social media. I think this is an Important breakthrough in language because there are people that have not gotten the same education opportunities as others, and social media provides them with an outlet to be heard. For example if you want to stand up for a specific issue a person could post a video or a picture with either no caption or a caption simply saying “this needs to stop” or “we need change.” Short messages like this could get thousands or millions of likes, retweets or views and the poster doesn’t have to be grammatically correct.
Chrissy Teigen’s most popular tweet of the year in this screenshot was “uhhhhhh. Yeah. We know” as a reply to another’s tweet (I cropped it because it contains political messages, which I want to refrain from using here). The tweet was most certainly not grammatically correct and used short sentences and “uhhh” not even a word, yet that didn’t stop the 250,000 people from retweeting it.
That tweet is a very good example of what you are talking about here!
ReplyDeleteSomething very interesting to me as an... Internet Old(tm)... is that very VERY early on in the internet's history, you would absolutely have people who insisted on typing formally and gramatically correctly, and wanted other people to as well... and they were almost universally completely derided and mocking. People STILL know the term "grammar nazi," right? That's when it started being used a lot online. I find it really interesting that basically from the get-go, people online very quickly decided they were not only going to relax grammar standards, they were gonna mock and insult the heck out of anyone who tried to tell them to stop.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great example of forwarding, too. This class has really opened my eyes to how the internet really has altered language, or at least how we use it. Great example that goes really well with your topic!
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