“ Are Digital Media Changing Language? ” is an article by Naomi S. Baron that talks about the impact of media to our language. In this day and age there’s no denying that media have penetrated so deeply in our society that it could actually change the way some people speak and write. The author focused on digital media; which are texts, graphics, audios, and videos that can be transmitted over the internet or computer networks. Naomi Baron started the article by saying that languages naturally evolve but what we must be concerned about is how media changes our attitudes toward language.
For me, the article was beautifully written by the author, it exposed a lot of information that could make someone like me aware of how media greatly affects the language we use. Generation Z is the generation which is currently being born. The people in this generation contains the trait of having had lifelong use of communication and media technology like the World Wide Web, instant messaging, text messaging, MP3 players, and mobile phones, earning them the nickname “ digital natives”.
So it’s increasingly difficult to avoid exposing young people in media and it is said today that most learning occurs outside our classrooms, the information conveyed by press, magazines, films, and radio broadcasts exceeds that information conveyed by the school. It is dangerous to spend so much time reading, listening, and watching different kinds of media because we might be influenced and we might adopt the language they use even though some are actually nice but it’s hard to determine which language are appropriate to use, for example new words have been invented to reflect the use of a particular service, like in twitter.
When we post to twitter the action is called ‘ tweeting’ and the post is called a ‘ tweet’. Then there are abbreviations to add for example BTW which means by the way. Sometimes students accidentally slip it to their school works, if they are so used to using shortcuts that they don’t notice it anymore 4 example dis ? , look how informal it looks like. I would like to share an experience few years back when my mom received a text from her friend, and it had a “ LOL” at the end which means laughing out loud.
My mom had no idea what that meant that time, she assumed it was a typographical error that must be ‘ ulol’ which meant crazy or silly in the Filipino language, so my mom got really mad and she told us. Just then we informed her that it was a famous shortcut used in the internet nowadays. Language indeed is important and everyone must be aware of it or else life would be one big mess.
However, there is no doubt that media also brings a lot of benefits to us and it could be used as a language learning tool, but we must put our attention on how it went wrong so that we could change for the better. I guess we must know our limit on using the different kind of media. Don’t spend so much time watching, listening, and reading that could influence the way we think and act in a bad way. This homework reminded me of how penetrative media have become, I hope others would be reminded too.