Our ability to reach across time and space and build connections via technology with anyone, anywhere and at any time is changing more than our sense of community; it’s changing how we communicate, too.
“There is a new language being produced, although it’s not replacing our existing language,” says anthropologist Patricia Sachs Chess, founder and president of Social Solutions Inc., a consulting firm in Tempe, Ariz.
Chess and others point to the use of slang and jargon (both pre-existing and newly developed for today’s instant communication tools), phonics, abbreviations and colloquial syntax as the evolving standards for electronic discourse.
And this new vernacular is spilling over into traditional writing and oral exchanges. “The first thing that comes to mind is the term bandwidth,” Chess says. “It is a technology term and has become incorporated in the language in ways such as, ‘Do you have enough bandwidth to take on that project?’ There’s also ‘I’ll IM you’ and ‘Just text me.’ “
While we aren’t seeing those yet in formal writing, she says, they are common in casual writing such as e-mails and in everyday conversation.
This emerging language could presage even deeper changes in what we value, which skills we possess and, ultimately, what we’re capable of. For example, Gregory S. Smith, vice president and CIO at World Wildlife Fund, a Washington-based nonprofit, says he has seen the quality of writing among younger generations of workers decline in the past decade or so, corresponding with the rise in instant messaging, texting and Twitter.
“The advent of tools that allow for these short types of content are flooding the Internet with writing that doesn’t matter, and they’re lowering the grammatical and writing skills of our up-and-coming professionals,” says Smith, who also teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
