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It has slowly come to my attention that I find myself on the cusp of a generation that cannot be bothered; to cook, (order fast food) to read, (skim the net) to wait for a film, (instant access online) to write, (just text) to talk, (just email) - it goes on, and the underlying thread of all this impatience is technology. What has fast paced living done to our language? What of the habits it has induced in an entire generation that no longer even care to articulate a full word, let alone a full sentence?
I certainly have caught a little of this language lapse and put it down to lost hours spent on social networking sites, where this mentality of fast information exchange has transferred in to a very acceptable and widely used social language. I was familiar with the old school abbreviations you know? Where we perhaps missed a letter out or use a number as a substitute, when we had the credit to text a friend on our brick-sized Nokia. If you were really skilled, you could type using ‘predictive text’, barely enunciating the first few letters before its finished for you. Yet this was tame stuff compared to the length in which we cap our words today. When abbreviations become a daily occurrence you begin to learn that ‘brb’ is ‘be right back, ‘rofl’ is ‘roll on floor laughing’ (obviously) and so on until you have a completely different communication system, with only a hint at previously belonging to the English language. Yet if we consider, I taught my Nan to use her phone, this is a woman who back in the day, could type one hundred words a minute and take an entire books-worth of dictation with her eyes shut, but give her a phone and the option of predictive text and she stares at me blankly asking 'why the phone is deciding what her message will be?' As a secretary in the eighties shorthand was a highly essential skilled for her and to this day she can remember how to read and write the strange flicks and curves of her own generations abbreviation system. But ultimately its hardly unusual that through the ages people have developed and experimented with making language quicker and more efficient to communicate and mutations of words in sub-cultures have formed colloquialism that have stuck. So as technology got quicker so did our need for shorter word and faster signifiers.
But what happens when this habit leaks out from instant messengers and text messages and in to our writing and even our physical conversations? I am now hearing people actually say ‘LOL’ instead of laughing! So what, now we are short-circuiting our emotions? But don’t think it’s gone unnoticed, a majority of the time someone actually says ‘LOL’ it is more of an ironic poke at their own subculture than a genuine replacement. Abbreviations are now words in themselves and the sound a word in itself! At what point does an abbreviation cross over from a colloquial shortcut to a feature of modern English language?
It isn’t just abbreviations, even when we do speak English, the ‘tweet-teens generation’ have soaked up a social environment of fast technology, fast living and instant everything, that there is certainly a skewed focus steering their latest colloquialisms. At the moment the fad in my social circle and overheard pub conversations is ‘really?’ Pronounced with a sarcastic intonation, an edge of pseudo disbelief, with an over dramatic inflection that can be thrown at almost any comment. Used to not only enquire validation over a point but as a statement and winning retort on your behalf to cut short the conversation. We have adopted our ‘online’ tone of short, brief answers and abrupt endings in our real conversations and this ‘really’ business is another extension of our supposed disbelief, really indicating non-committal mentality to delve in to a topic.
Writing has developed in tone as well, even noticeably in the highest circles of authors, a conversational tone and direct flow of consciousness in style engages the modern reader’s newly moulded and notoriously hard to focus ‘interest radar’. They connect with it as if it were a more sophisticated and evolved version of the statuses and stories they read all day for leisure and this is surely a notable observational to writers wishing to engage an ever more reluctant audience, who are easily torn away by the flicker of the television or pop up chat.
