Is the development and popularity of social media slowly destroying the art of language or gently restoring it?

When Timehop was launched in 2011, what we thought was our long lost, never-to-be-viewed-again Facebook comments and tweets buried deep in our social archives, were in fact found. Yet here, when they began to be regurgitated over our news feeds - with the intention for you to reminisce over past events, all we are reminded of, was how we decided the choice of three extra vowels at the end of each sentence looked cool or the overuse of old-school letter-punctuation emoticons between :L every XD word =) was an accurate portrayal of our emotions. As this recent reflection of how we represented ourselves on-line as young adults inflicts great embarrassment and with the help of these nostalgic apps, we have seemed to, whether it being subconscious or comes with growing up, slowly returned back to the Standard English we were taught at school.

Only until recent years has the alpha-numerical word combinations been less frequently used in multi-modal language, appearing more often in ironic backlashes to arguments or to portray certain feelings on social media, where sarcasm is not as misinterpreted as it previously had been. If you are seen to make an obvious spelling comprised only of consonants teamed with numbers, one must assume you were held back from expressing your full opinion within Twitter's 140 characters available or not quite adjusted to how technology and text-talk has evolved.

The lexis that was commonly used within texting and on social media has drastically phased out amongst the younger generations, however the acronyms such as 'LOL' are still often heard as well as read, although more often than not, used sarcastically. Through social media increasing in popularity, sites such as Twitter have too, evolved their own lexis, 'dpmo' as 'don't piss me off' and 'smh' meaning 'shake my head', often seen when the author is upset or in despair, often at another user's post.

As David Crystal states, "All the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. It isn't just used by the young generation," emphasises the common difficulty younger generations find with the elder generation's multi-modal communication, whereby they try to minimise the amount of characters they need per message, whether in an email or SMS which often results in messages with a lack of punctuation and grammatical sense.

Due to the introduction of mobile applications that allow quick access to social media sites without the need to sign in each time and the autocorrect software installed in our devices - although often spewing out unimaginable suggestions for our spelling or grammar mistakes, we are able to use Standard English on-line at ease. Not only does this rectify the time spent on searching for the 8 to minimise the characters needed in 'late' per text or tweet, but restoring the use of full words, correctly spelt.

By Rosalie Pugh

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/25/facebooks-timehop-nostalgia-is-just-a-way-to-exploit-emotions-for-data

http://ww.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/Internet16.pdf

https://www.brandwatch.com/2013/05/research-shows-twitter-is-driving-english-language-evolution/