THE LANGUAGE OF THE INTERNET THEN AND NOW

THE LANGUAGE OF THE INTERNET: THEN AND NOW MICHAEL LAZARUS AND ROGER HUDAK

WHAT HAS CHANGED? (YES, THIS IS OUR RESEARCH QUESTION) -Have you noticed the shift in the language that we use over the internet? Maybe we are too young to have realized the shift, but it happened nonetheless. -The original writings that were uploaded to the internet were for educational and for lack of a better word, intelligent, purposes. Nowadays, you see postings like this:

… G N I N N I G E B E H T IN

IMAGINE THE YEAR IS 1991. THE INTERNET HAS JUST BEEN OPENED FOR PUBLIC USE. Not many people knew what the internet was. Was it some sort of scam? No, it most definitely was not a scam and it is easily the most used thing in our lives today. Buzzfeed video on what life was like before the internet

DID YOU KNOW THE INTERNET WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED TO SHARE INFORMATION BETWEEN PHYSICISTS? • According to The. Next. Web article "20 years ago today, the World Wide Web opened to the public, " Berners-Lee wanted a place for physicists to share information. He wanted "a large hypertext database with typed links. " An early model of the WWW has been archived and is viewable here. You can draw the conclusion from looking at this archived site, that the very first uploads to the internet used proper English in the sense that there was no slang used.

LOOK AT IT LIKE THIS If the initial purpose of the internet was to distribute highly intelligent and scientific information, the question now is this: where did it all go wrong? Granted, this same intelligent language can still be found on the internet, but the overwhelming majority of communication online uses a glaringly different language than that which is found in the documents originally uploaded to the internet.

YOUR POINT IS? • Essentially, we are seeing a kind of backwards motion in today's world. With the integration of technology into almost everything we do, the internet is being utilized more than ever for even the most basic tasks. This is not an issue, but one particular side effect is the growing influence of things like social media and online discussion boards which has turned what was first a few shortened words to make talking easier online into something unintelligible to those who don't know where it comes from.

NOW, IMAGINE THE YEAR IS 2006 • A popular new social networking site has just been created and it is called Twitter. Do you know what the first tweet was? No? Well, here it is:

HOW THIS ALL RELATES TO WHAT WE'VE DONE IN CLASS • Well, according to the Getting Ready to Read section on page 711, Wardle and Downs state that, "They. . . " (educators and children's advocates) ". . . are concerned that the quality of writing by young Americans is being degraded by their electronic communication, with its carefree spelling, lax punctuation and grammar, and its acronym shortcuts. " • Basically, what Wardle and Downs are trying to say is that many teachers and children's advocates are nervous that young American writers won't use proper English due to online communications and the use of slang which further proves our point.

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IN ADDITION… • In the Lenhart et al. article, James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, was quoted as saying that “young Americans’ electronic communication might be damaging ‘the basic unit of human thoughtthe sentence. ” Furthermore, Naomi Baron states in her article that as a result of the modern treatment of the English language, “The result that many graduates from even the finest U. S. preparatory institutions could not spell and had no clue how to use a semicolon. ”

WHICH EXPLAINS THESE…

WORKS CITED • http: //thenextweb. com/insider/2011/08/06/20 -years-ago-today-theworld-wide-web-opened-to-the-public/ • http: //www. w 3. org/History/19921103 hypertext/WWW/The. Project. html