LING248 Reflective Blog Post: Analyzing Social Media Cyber Language

This reflective blog post discusses the impact of social networking and cyber language, particularly among teenagers. It explores the evolution of online communication through platforms like Facebook and Twitter, highlighting the use of hashtags, links, and abbreviated language. The author reflects on both the positive and negative aspects, including the potential for abusive language and the prevalence of humor and sarcasm. The post also touches on the challenges of moderating content and the evolving nature of online expression, concluding that social media language reflects individual experiences and thoughts in real-time. Desklib provides students with access to similar assignments and past papers for further study.

Social Networking and Cyber language

With the evolution of technology, and particularly the internet, the process of spread of
information has become enormously quick. Online social networking is essentially the use of
websites to connect with other people and share news and information with them. This is
commonly achieved by making a profile that is password protected and can thus only be
accessed by the person owning the profile. Such sites allow the members to socialize with their
friends by adding them to their profile, sending those messages and commenting on their statuses
displayed on the pages of their profiles. Social networking sites most commonly in use today are
Facebook and Twitter. I have account with both Facebook and Twitter.
Most teenagers necessarily visit these websites several times in a day all over the world.
According to a recent research generated by the Pew Internet Project, as many as 93 percents of
the teenagers in America between the age of 12 years and 17 years are regular users of the
internet, and 55 percent of such teenagers spend most of the time using social networking
websites. Social networking sites cause a lot of troubles in the life of teenagers. As a result of the
expanded social circle because of internet social networking, I have heard of a few teenagers
who have fallen prey of pedophiles and kidnappers.
The coming of social media networking sites has necessitated the development of internet
and cyber languages. These languages are diverse and depending on the site that one is using.
For instance, take a look at the below Facebook post that I came across.

Most people using Facebook post long conversations which is different from those using
Twitter. The Twitter posts are kept short. Take a look at the below Twitter post that I saw
trending.
Social networking language shows the use of links that will take you to another page. As
evident in Twitter posts, there is the use of Hashtags. The tags can enable many people to
contribute to a single conversation or topic using the same hashtag. I was literally tweeting about
#QualityEduation from my phone.
Since there is freedom in the use of social media sites, then the language used can
sometimes be abusive. Some go the extent of using vulgar language so that site’s efforts to try
and detect and pull down these posts amount to nothing. See below post that I came across. It is
abusive while trying to achieve humor.

Most of the time social media sites language is the way it is because it tries to bring
humor out of every situation. You can find a post that is genuine and innocently asking for
something but gets sarcastic comments. From where I stand, social media sites and cyber
language is all about what one is experiencing, what one is thinking about at a given point in
time.