The communication levels in teens have dropped significantly since 1990. Why 1990 you say? The invention of the cellular telephone.
When communication was made easier! A little too easy. This is when the use of acronyms skyrocketed. Then facebook was created and the teen population found another place to nourish their language and ultimately affect the adult population. It all started with the acronym "lol", that essentially means you "laugh out loud". When someone is texting in a library, and messages, "lol", I expect them exclaim their "lol", but it doesn't happen. After "lol" was created and the teen population noticed that acronyms made "communicating" effortless, the acronyms grew exponentially. "Lol", "wtf", "rofl", "lms", "tbh", "brb", "ttfn", and the list goes on and on. Granted I am still a "teenager", but I refuse to be labeled as the "flippy hair", skate boarding crowd.
I do a significant amount of psychological work on facebook, and one of my "friends" posted, "OMG donuts FTW". So I asked him what "FTW" means and he thought I was joking. "It means 'for the win' dude lol!" This is when I had a thought, what the heck has society been whittled down to that we rely on acronyms to have normal day to day conversation. We have developed this "acronymical" society that makes us sound like cave men. I was text messaging my friend and she told me I was, essentially, a communication "noob". I then told her that she was in fact the communication "noob". Let us think back to where communication got its debut, we started with horsemen with messenger bags, delivering letters across great distances. Then the telegraph machine was created and the development of morse code. Then there was the telephone that you would communicate off of a landline. Then came the car phone and the cellular phone that allowed you to talk on the go. But the boom in "de-communication" started with the "sms".
The reason I am griping like an old folk is because I am concerned for the future of the human language. Maybe in ten years we will no longer be teaching our children the "ABC's" but the "OMG's". It needs to get out that our mode of communication sucks and it needs to change. Besides, if the U.S. Congress can make pizza a vegetable, they can surely make acronyms illegal.
Greetings, My name is Lucas Davis, I am an avid cyclist, and I love profiling, doing mind tricks, and utilizing Logotherapy. Here's my mind in a nut shell! More or less...
I would love see the link about pizza vegetable legislation. Also I noticed you neglected to talk about smoke signals as means of communication. Native Americans were probably lol-ing long before the SMS.
ReplyDeleteAs to your fear of the degradation of language, well people have been worried about english since Shakespeare, but I do think young people have been losing DEPTH in their communication. Why tell someone they are behind the times on texting when you can just call them a noob? As you kind of allude to, youth are no longer interested in the effort it requires to communicate on a real level. They'd rather lol and wtf and pretend that no one understands them because no one's listening. The truth is it's because often they're too lazy to say what they're thinking or they never learned the vocabulary to explain themselves clearly. Pretty good post though. Way to keep your eyes open.