Signs & Signifiers: How Social Media is Creating a New Language

Social media is constantly changing the way we communicate. Language as we know it has evolved drastically because of the internet. Here are three ways social media is breaking down the barriers of traditional means of communication and enhancing our language.

Hash Tags and Lolspeak

Through status updates and tweets, we can communicate with other people using brief and concise language. The character limit in social media forces us to keep our posts short and concise. This gives us better chances of having more people read what we post. Since they are brief and simple, they are also easier to understand.

Social media has integrated lolspeak and hash tags into our language to compress our ideas down to 140 characters. Lolspeak are words and acronyms developed by users for the internet. They are usually short, but convey a lot of ideas. For example, the lolpeak term LOL, which stands for laugh out loud, is oftentimes used in comments when we find something funny on the internet. Hash tags on the other hand are words attached after the # symbol. They emphasize certain words and they direct people to more information about what we post on the internet.

Images and video

In the world of social media, images are not just about capturing moments in our lives, anymore. Now, images have become a powerful means to communicate without the use of words. Images connect us with other people even when we cannot speak or understand their language. Images also reinforce our ideas. They make reading easier and more entertaining for us because we can better imagine what we read.

Videos are also becoming popular in social media. Web apps like Vine, Snapchat, and Instagram video now enable us to create short videos (usually spanning several seconds long) and send them to other users. This is relatively a new platform to social media, but it’s already highly successful. Twitter’s Vine app already has about 13 million users since it began operation in January. The time limit on these video apps also makes them easier to view and share.

Share Buttons and Icons

Share buttons and icons bring interaction with other people to a whole new level. The share button is a very potent method to spread new ideas. The more we gain information, the more we can apply it to real life. The internet is making our lives easier in giving us access to information efficiently, and share buttons give us a way to also let others easily access the information that we find.

Every single social media platform has share buttons and icons to let us send information to other places on the internet. Communication is very dynamic, and the share buttons in social media offer an uninterrupted flow of information with the right internet provider like http://www.centurylinkdeals.com/internet/Missouri/. Language changes when we change the way we send ideas, and share buttons help keep our language fluid.

People are more connected than ever because of the internet and social media. The internet is the new language, and it continues to change how we communicate.