It occurred to me that not only has technology changed the world by its impact on professions, businesses, relationships, education, information dissemination and on and on but it has also changed Language - both written and spoken. Words exist today that did not exist a few years ago. We speak differently today that we did 10 years ago. While it has not as yet reached the grandesse of the disparity between the days of "thee" and "thou" and modern English, we are heading in that direction. Language, is becoming (or so it seems to me) more informal. Maybe it all began somewhere around the time when the dot.comers began making it big. Texting brought us a deluge of commonly-accepted acronyms (lol, rofl, yolo, btw, ttyl, brb) which are now used in speech. Google officially became a verb. Birds no longer have proprietary claim to tweeting and wikis mean something other than a new, tropical drink. Learning where the @ and # keys are on the keyboard is no longer optional.
When we began this class, I was introduced to terms like hashtags, RSS Feeds, @replies, @mentions, and tagging to name but a few (not the tagging used in games nor hanging from a dress in a store). Oftentimes the meaning of these words cannot be divined from the context in which they are used but required a specific explanation or definition to convey their meaning. Take, for example, the term "hashtags". I can't count the number of times I've seen or heard it over the past two weeks. Although I visited Twitter (native home of hashtags) and beheld hashtags in all their glory and abundance I still only had a vague idea of what they were and how they should be used. All that changed today when I read Dr. Dennen's and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's papers on....Hashtags!! TA DAH!
P.S. I still haven't incorporated or tried to actually use a hashtag but will in the very near future.
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