Newer phones and the older generation...

[mookydooky]

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ba/2004/ba040331.gif

[Daniel ~]

Does anyone still use phones to call people up? ":O}

[stigweed]

Sometimes. TExt messaging has a lot to answer for. A lot of people I know seem to get together with partners basically by text message. There's a whole load of text politics that determine what you should say, how much you should say, what kind of tone the message should have. So many people now seem to be unable to communicate through a non-text medium. While internet chat and forums offer the same distance to allow people to open up and share feelings and things more easily, text messaging is severely limited in the amount of information you can send and its no way to hold a relationship together.

Then there's people who text eachother from a different room in teh same house. (Although at uni we;ve begun MSNing eachother rather than walking up the stairs).

Texting is evil.

[Kaitain]

T mst anoyn thg abt txt msgn s txt spk
(The most annoying thing about text messaging is "text speak"). I had to get my (14 year old) cousin to translate that for me

[danrok]

I think texting is not so popular in the USA. Whereas, here there's no doubt that some people have a real problem with it! What get's my back up is that people who are constantly texting and recieving texts don't disable the message received beeps. What is the point if you are constantly getting messages? You don't need to hear the beeps and nor do I! LOL

[Daniel ~]

I guess it's an age thing, seems mental to me, all this progress and now we are back to using what are essentially mobile telegraphs sending telegrams to each other !?

What ever happened to the "Hear Grandma's voice" school of telecommunications?

[dod]

Originally Posted by stigweed

Texting is evil.

I constantly annoy my wife. I have refused to learn how to text although I have learned how to read them as she insists on sending me "Get this on the way home" messages.

I really hate mobiles. Only reason I have one is for customers. I regularly go for 2 or three months at a time without making a call of any kind on it.

[Gizmo]

I don't hate mobiles. I just haven't found a really compelling reason to use one. I do have one, mainly for emergencies (like when I'm stuck 5 miles from the nearest electric post because I did something stupid like forget to fill up my car with gas before I took off, and it's -4F, or about -20C).

The shorthand notation thing could be come a real problem.

U cnt tp a frml ltr usng shthd.

There are a lot of young'uns coming up who aren't going to be able to communicate in the real world. That kind of shorthand works when everyone speaks a common language, but is totally lost when taken outside the context of the culture that created it.

[Daniel ~]

Nope, there are a lot of old foggies like us that will lose touch with the "real" world...this sucks for us hey Gizmo! ":O}

[Gizmo]

Yeah, well, I gave up caring what the rest of the world thought when I figured out that the rest of the world didn't care what I thought. There are a few individuals whose opinion matters to me; as for the rest......

[Daniel ~]

Spoken like a true old fogy!

Hey If you hadn't said it I would have had to!LOL

[Kaitain]

Originally Posted by gizmo

There are a lot of young'uns coming up who aren't going to be able to communicate in the real world. That kind of shorthand works when everyone speaks a common language, but is totally lost when taken outside the context of the culture that created it.

You have to know the rules of the language before you can break them Ditto for that idea of mixing up the component letters of a word provided the start and end letters are correct and all letters are present. Non-native speakers of the language do read the word, so are totally lost by it.

My young cousin occasionally pops up on MSN. In the beginning they would try to use txt spk, with various alphanumeric substitutions, however I don't understand that (I've only ever had phones with predictive text). In addition, there was no punctuation involved, so separating out concepts was nearly impossible; it was the verbal equivalent of mashed potato. I have managed to eliminate that habit almost completely (in conversations with me). Unfortunately it's highlighted serious problems with the child's spelling and grammar (absence thereof).

While on the Tube the other morning, I heard a group of children that seemed to speak in some form of shorthand as well; they seemed to be able to understand one another, speaking a dialect consisting of only one or two vowel sounds, a limited number of consonants, a lot of glottal stops and a stock of repeated phrases. Additionally, the appeared to signal the end of their speech by asking for something to be initialised. Or maybe initiated. I couldn't work it out.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Daniel ~

Spoken like a true old fogy!

Hey If you hadn't said it I would have had to!LOL

Now that truly scares me.

Being 37, I hardly qualify as Old Fogy. I leave that to you.

[Gizmo]

Originally Posted by Kaitain

While on the Tube the other morning, I heard a group of children that seemed to speak in some form of shorthand as well; they seemed to be able to understand one another, speaking a dialect consisting of only one or two vowel sounds, a limited number of consonants, a lot of glottal stops and a stock of repeated phrases. Additionally, the appeared to signal the end of their speech by asking for something to be initialised. Or maybe initiated. I couldn't work it out.

I haven't heard this dialect, but my middle child seems to be picking up something at school. I have insisted that proper English (well, I guess as proper as American English gets, anyway) be spoken in my house.

[rant=on]
My concern is that all of these children are learning to communicate in a language that is exclusive to their clique. While this may serve to emphasize their uniqueness and 'specialness', it also serves to isolate and divide them from others. Once a child gets out of the 'hood, they discover that they are woefully unprepaired to compete in the world. So what happens? They blame their parents, the school system, the government; anyone but themselves. And then they become a burden to society, by insisting that society take care of them while giving little to nothing back.

Like it or not, and regardless of whether it is fair or not, people form opinions about your intelligence based on how well you are able to communicate. If you use 'clique-speak', and 'IM-speak' when you communicate outside your circle, you are likely to be conveying the idea that you are an idiot, even if you in fact are not.

Beyond that, however, lies the fact that we are now communicating on a routine basis with people all over the world. Many of these people do not understand the cultural basis of the 'slang', even when they speak the same common language (witness the recent discussion about bodacious tatas). If you only know some 'slang' language, or can only communicate effectively in your 'slang', you might as well be speaking Martian for all the good it will do.

There are people right here on this forum who haven't got the foggiest idea how to properly punctuate a sentence or formulate a single coherent thought in text, or so it would seem. I have no doubt they are intelligent people, but reading their messages is like deciphering the writing of my 4-year-old son. They come here looking for help, and then don't understand why we can't comprehend what they are asking for help about. It's very difficult when you don't even seem to be using the same vocabulary and grammar.
[rant=off]

Sorry for the book.

[Daniel ~]

What can I say Gizmo, your stogy beyond your years! LOL

I'm a bit less concerned. Youth has to play with language, break it down and see what works for them. They stray as far as possible from accepted form within their sets, seeking identity and expression of those identities outside the confines of accepted practice.

Yet in the end they are drawn back to a more mainstream means of expression by the need to move beyond the set they began with.

If only by moving into a new set and abandoning or seeing a great modification in the habits, creative excesses and singular expressions of the old one.

There's probably never been a generation that strayed as far nor sold out a rapidly as did my own. We found out that we really didn't want to live in VW busses or Tee-pees, eating Granola and brown rice exclusively

That "the man" could be best embraced by something laughingly called "Situational Ethics" (In this situation ethics just get in the way).

There's nothing really deep going on, in five years they will vote as their parents vote and sound much the same.