Technology Is Ruining Our Language Analysis

Albert Einstein once said “I fear the day that technology will surpass human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots”. Although I wouldn’t exactly say idiots, Einstein is still making quite the statement. In the 21st century we have become so dependent on technology that it has just become a part of our daily routine. We use social media to share what we are doing, feeling, eating, and wearing. We use text messaging to keep connected instead of meeting with a person face to face. We are changing the way we write by paraphrasing everything to the texting lingo and becoming accustomed to using that in our academic writing. Not only is technology becoming addictive, it’s going to end up corrupting our lives. Social media started

In the past year, fifteen new words have been added to the Webster Dictionary including Selfie, Catfish, and Hashtags, all products of social networking. In John Humpreys article I H8 TXT MSGS, he advocates how text messaging is ruining our language. One example he uses is how the Oxford English Dictionary has removed the hyphens from over 16000 words. He states “Has it really come to this? Are our lives really so pressured, every minute occupied in so many vital tasks, every second accounted for, that we cannot afford the millisecond (no hyphen) it takes to tap that key?”(175). We have become accustomed to relying on autocorrect to fix our mistakes instead of taking the time and fixing it ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, I use paraphrasing as well. I find myself shortening contraction words, especially “can’t” to “cnt” and so on. However when I wrote my first paper in college my professor told me not to use contraction words anymore. Can you believe that?! Contractions words. These are words we all have been using forever, and now in college we have to start spelling everything out entirely. If we are getting so used to paraphrasing our texting lingo, what’s going to happen when we have to be more proper and we cannot shorten anything anymore? Even though the times may change and culture is changing how they communicate, in an academic setting we as students are still responsible to know how to use proper grammar full spelling. Using texting lingo is creating sloppy habits for