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 had me thinking about how different we talk from people back then.
English was a very proper and well structured back then, but now, all over social media, people use abbreviations like "lol" and "smh" and other 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 technology's fault for making us not have to think about proper English anymore and in turn made us less competent on the subject?
Marcela Perez
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DeleteI do not feel as though we are becoming lazier as much as we do not feel we actually have the time allotted to dedicate to each other because of our now instantaneous means of communication, such as email or text. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people did not have these fast methods of communication, and they had to use letters, which they would personally write out, which were also considered extremely formal. We are proper when we need to be, but we also abbreviate when we need to. People, nowadays, can talk to and converse with a person in a text within minutes, when back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people had to wait weeks, maybe even months, to receive a response from one person, given they even had enough money to write to them. Language has adapted all throughout history, especially informal language, from when Shakespeare wrote his most famous works to when Barack Obama gave his first inauguration speech. Perhaps we are not getting lazier, but our language is just adapting as our technology adapts along with it.
ReplyDelete-Samantha Boyd