Social Media and Language Sophie Schwab

I wasn’t able to fully understand the impact of language on our culture until I read one specific sentence written by John T. Warren and Deanna L. Fasset. The authors stated, “The language we use helps to create and maintain the cultures we belong to, and the cultures we belong to shape our language use” (pg. 84). We discussed in class the impact of language within a culture. We often are unaware of other cultures languages and carry around a sense of egocentrism when we expect other cultures to use the same language as us. The example we looked at in class was the message NASA sent to space in hopes of communicating with an outside source. This was a decent plan, however we did not take into consideration that those who live in space may not have the same language as we do on earth and more specifically in America so the message could and probably was completely lost.

            We see this is our everyday lives. Social media is a huge part of our culture and the language we speak in reflects that. And visa versa, the language we use represents our culture and everyday life. When I think of a way language shapes our culture and our culture shapes our language, I think of twitter. Twitter is a huge part of our culture today. It is used for entertainment and for news. Social media has shaped our language to be less complex in a sense. The culture on twitter expects us to get all of our thoughts and ideas down in 140 characters or less. This results in the shortening of sentences, abbreviation of words, and simplicity of statements.

 This is significant to our language and how we communicate. And even more significant when we are talking about twitter in terms of news or politics or current events. We are only getting the shortened version of things. I see this affecting my academic life. In my social media culture, it is acceptable for me to use the simplest sentences or not even sentences at all. I have gotten used to the language on twitter that is very informal, with incomplete thoughts. I find that now when I am in the academic culture, I struggle to get into the academic language again. My academic culture is vastly different from my academic culture and it is often difficult to switch between the two on a daily basis. From this, I learned just how big of an impact our culture has on the language we speak as well as the languages’ effects on culture.