Twitter or Facebook may seem like an annoying and hyperactive way to communicate, but it is almost a compulsion for many. While Facebook still gives you the liberty to be a bit more elaborate with words, Twitter with its cap of 140 characters offers limited room. What all of this means is, you have to be concise and know exactly what you want to say, in as few words as possible.
This has led users to either compress their thoughts or shift to acronyms. While the latter has had an adverse effect on a person’s language proficiency, there’s also a bright side to this. Poet Carol Ann Duffy recently said that communicating via mobile phones and through social networking sites has helped teenagers condense their thoughts. Her views are in stark contrast to others who have lamented how modern language is being killed by the “Facebook generation”.
Language is a means and the end that it seeks to achieve is communication, says Arjun Natrajan, a lawyer and an aspiring poet and explains, “Social networking has injected an element of beauty in the use of language. Expression of thoughts has become more personable, deep and the use of poetic devices has made it rich. Simple expressions are often rendering multiple meanings. All humans are inherently poetic beings and social networking has given an impetus to the poet (good or bad) within.”
Less words mean you have to “pump up” your verbs and explore a more concise way to convey. Also apart from replacing longer words with shorter synonyms, one eventually learns to edit their work. “It is like a brainteaser, forcing me to think hard and dig deep down into my vocabulary to find a way to shorten my message, make it pretty and impactful,” remarks Santu Misra, a fashion designing student.
However, software professional Paritosh Uttam feels that the “modern language” of social networking makes people lazy to think through something. “Twitter does force one to get rid of extraneous words and makes you think. But gradually you lose patience to express deeper and fuller thoughts as everything has to be expressed or understood in the first two lines in order to keep it short and crisp,” says Uttam.