Turning News Into Knowledge

Since people started communicating online they’ve been searching for better – or just faster – ways of saying what they need to. The internet is full of acronyms (lol brb roflmao) and emoticons , but it’s also working to shape the way people communicate –giving rise to new words on what often feels like a daily basis.

Though languages are constantly evolving (how many of us still communicate in middle English?) the modern world has seen new technologies push the boundaries of speed –nothing more so than social media.

Not everyone is happy with this, as can be seen by the New York Times asking writers to stop using “tweet”.
The argument here is that Standard English and spoken English are two different entities, and only the former should have a regular place in news articles.

While this garnered a lot of attention, of more interest is how the language of social media is used
Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus examined the phenomenon of un-words

One of the hallmarks of social media is the ability for users to register their interest in something they see. But what if you change your mind? Then you can always undo the action that you’ve made.
LiveJournal, a virtual community of bloggers and diary-keepers, has been a pioneer in this type of usage. LiveJournalers were among the first to make friend into a transitive verb to describe the act of adding someone to an online list of acquaintances. (Other social networks like MySpace and Friendster soon got in on the act too.) To remove someone from friend status requires defriending or unfriending. Either the de- or the un- prefix works as a “reversative,” indicating the undoing of a reversible act (though un- seems to be winning out over de- as the preferred prefix these days).

Zimmer’s post is well worth the read, highlighting what is less an erosion of language than a new way of speaking. Social media users have simply invented a way of saying things English simply wasn’t equipped for.

In his post, Zimmer references a column by lexicographer Erin McKean in The Boston Globe.

In it, McKean examines not just the proliferation of tw– words used for everything twitter, but how twitter effects writing itself. And she sees it as far from a bad thing.

…it’s not just the twords that make Twitter interesting, it’s the character limit, the implicit constraint of being interesting, witty, informative – in short, of being worthy of the limited attention of your followers. The best tweets of Twitter (some of them collected on the occasionally not-safe-for-work site Favrd.com) are more epigrammatic than newsy. Twitter demands writerliness in a way that instant messages, text-messaging, and even blogging don’t.

McKean doesn’t see social media communication as a destruction of language, but instead as another step in the constantly-evolving world of communication.

Just as “blog” has become a common, and accepted, term for a new written form, terms like “tweet” and “unfriend” are part of the constant struggle to maintain communication in a constantly changing online world.

It’s hard to see anything wrong with that.

Jen Hogan is a Media Analyst at MediaMiser, follow her @jenogan