Lecture #10 (Part 1) - Just how big is the impact of technology on society

 

Q1: Visit University Oxford Press at http://global.oup.com/?cc=us. For all years after 2010, find the new word of the year and all the runner-up words perform the simple analysis we presented in the final paragraph above. How has technology impacted the English language in the years after 2010?

Technology’s role in our lives is astonishing. Its effect on the way we communicate has changed the English language forever. What is hugely different, is the way we write today. That is the area where technology has had the biggest impact. Most of the new words coming up are technology related. 

Q2: While technology has certainly impacted our language in the last several years, so has the environment, perhaps to an even greater extent than technology. Why have so many environment-related words inserted themselves into our language?

Human are living in a rapidly changing environment, and our daily life, conversation, actions, etc are all affected our surrounding environment. For example, the new word selfie is referring to a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website. This is absolutely true as we can see most youngsters nowadays love to do this. Less people taking picture using camera, instead they are following the environment trend now, using selfie most of the time. This shows that whatever happen in our surrounding environment has greatly influence our English language. 

 

Q3: Create some new technology-related words. Think about the things you do with technology or have witnessed other people doing with technology. Create list of at least five new technology-related words. For each, describe how you derived them and also provide their definition.

 

Games developers have given us augmented reality, a mixture of real and computer-generated images, and immersive reality which gives the impression that the gamer is actually taking part in the imaginary scene. Geo-targeted applications such as those used in geosocial networking use information about the location of their users to provide relevant services. This is all increasingly clever stuff, as is the progression from the search engine to the decision engine, which aims to use sophisticated profiling to direct us to the information we need.

We had blogs (quickly shortened from the more formal ‘weblogs’). Then, sites like Twitter introduced the concept of microblogging (writing very short blogs). Now, we can follow people who are liveblogging from events of all sorts. Recently in the Middle East, for instance, information leaked out of areas of conflict via moblogging (blogging on the move, often using mobile phones to transfer the blogs to the internet). The world of blogging – also known as the blogosphere, is open to anyone, writing on any subject. We have blogonistas who blog about fashion, eco-blogs and mummy blogs covering environmental and parenting issues – almost any subject is bloggable for someone.

The huge popularity of Twitter means that most people are aware of tweets (the micro-blogs themselves) and the activity of tweeting.  Hashtags (words preceded by #) are used to identify subjects in tweets, and a subject that is being tweeted about a lot is said to be trending. As well as these specific words, though, it seems that Twitter has given people licence to prefix almost any word with ‘twit-’ or ‘tw-’.  The comedian Stephen Fry was said to have given a twinterview, and a protest launched on Twitter was dubbed a Twitchfork protest (by analogy with a ‘pitchfork protest’ in which ordinary people, armed only with the tools of their trade, rise up against their rulers). The Times reported that Victoria Beckham had posted ‘twitpics of her fashion shows and her dogs’, while The Guardian – talking about some celebrities who had expressed some unpleasant views – said that ‘Twitterstorms erupted over their controversial comments’.


 


People who spend too much time using computers should be aware that they are risking a host of previously unknown ailments.  They could end up with computer face (frown lines that result from staring at a screen), gorilla arm (a painful hand and arm caused by holding the arm up to operate a touch screen), laptop thigh (a rash or discolouration of the skin caused by heat from the laptop), or qwerty tummy (a bug picked up from someone else’s infected fingers on the keyboard).

Q4: What about text message abbreviations, emotions, and chat slang terms. Which have been formally recognized by University Oxford Press as a part of the English language? Is it good or bad that these are becoming a part of our formal language? Justify your answer

OMG (Oh my god), LOL (laughing out loud), BRB (be right back), BTW (by the way), are some examples of abbreviation found in University Oxford Press Online Dictionary.

It is not wrong to use all these abbreviation in our normal casual conversation; however it is not suitable for formal language since it is unprofessional.