Language and Communication

Language and Communication

  • Submitted By: Chrisf
  • Date Submitted: 10/01/2013 8:24 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 3042
  • Page: 13
  • Views: 1

Throughout our look at English, and the intricacies of communicating within it, one area has, until recently, received little attention and that area is SMS or Short Messaging Service, also referred to as ‘texting’. Initially intended for purely commercial purposes text-messaging is in fact yet another example of how the human need for social intercourse - a kind of 'communication imperative' - bends and ultimately co-opts technology to suit its own ends, regardless of any commercial (e.g. the telephone) or military (e.g. the internet) ambition for the technology (Thurlow p. 2). Much popular and public discourse nowadays attends to the perceived communicative paucity of young people and both 'teen-talk' and 'netlingo' (or 'webspeak') are often blamed for supposedly negative impacts on standard or 'traditional' ways of communicating (Thurlow p. 3). The same is especially true of young people's use of mobile phones and text-messaging, where they are often understood to be - or rather accused of - reinventing and/or damaging the (English) language (Thurlow p. 3). Regardless of such claims, SMS is here to stay and plays an integral part in young people’s everyday social lives. SMS has even been used by the President of the United States, Barak Obama, for announcing his candidate for Vice-presidential running mate (Thurlow & Poff p. 1). Clearly, SMS has become another medium of communication many of us have accepted and use daily. Although much of the research available “focuses on the transactional and often commercial uses of texting rather than the relational function which sits at the heart of most everyday texting (Thurlow & Poff p. 2).” Therefore, this paper will look at how a language, not just English as studies have been done in other countries, is manipulated to fit in the confines of 160 characters, the maximum length of a message. We will consider three questions: 1) Who is using SMS and why? 2) What is SMS’s impact on language? 3) How males and...

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