People, as the center of the world have a lot of control over things, and these things are developed around people’s preference, thus, can reflect the social trends of societies that people live in. Social media language is one example of these. It was developed from the formal English that people read and write with, however, under certain situation of human development, it varied a lot that differentiates and contradicts the tradition rules of English language.
There are several social trends that affect the variation of language and shape it into social media language. The biggest one is the fast-paced world that we live in. People in modern days are busy in various things. They have to study, work and take care of their families. As the population continuously grows, competitions have been created between people, so they all try to balance their time between communicating with others and the time which they need to focus on their specific tasks. People are focusing on their desires of things they want and the time they want them, thus limiting time on communicating by creating common sense on certain social media language rules. In this way, people can shorten the amount of time they need to greet people, read and write messages. Besides, as media has been well developed, celebrities can be displayed to the public easier to attract people’s attention. Things they do have become fashion trends that the general public tends to follow. Therefore, celebrities have been leading the trend of social media language on a large scale and boosted the interaction between people. In addition, people not only like to imitate celebrities, but also each other to fit in with the society’s lifestyle and fashions. People try to gain confidence through the process to have the sense of community and inclusiveness. All in all, there is a fundamental reason which is people are not doing face to face communication, instead, they are talking to screens so that they have to emphasize things that they want people to notice in order to communicate effectively.
Therefore, in this essay, the author is going to investigate on the relationship between social media language and social trends to see the connections and how one affects the other. This topic is significant to investigate on due to the fact that social media has been emerged suddenly and developed so quick that soon occupies people’s lives. It is worthy to see the connections behind that caused people to create social media language and how it reflects people’s lives. It will include characteristics of social media language, examples that correspond to those traits and how they can reflect the social trends in modern society.
This category of research has been started by great authors and researches. They had been investigating on the links between social media, the language it uses and people’s lifestyle. Therefore, products of their research have been meaningful sources for me to make references to. Also, in order to justify all those characteristics have been existing in real life, real examples from social media platforms are largely relied on by the author. By using the combination, points could be fairly argued. In the main essay, the author will discuss on characteristics of social media including its simplicity, informality, expression on emotions and how superficial the contents could be in terms of sharing personal and daily life details.
Living in a world that changes rapidly, people tend to save time on accomplish all their tasks to settle down smoothly, thus less time will be spent on unnecessary typing time. People established shared rules to communicate through ways that ensure its effectiveness and time saving. Therefore, abbreviation, omitted letters, emoticons and shortcuts exist for the purpose of saving time which creates succinctness. The abbreviation refers to shorten phrases or words; omitted letters are words that dropped vowels in the middle or at the end of words. Emoticons are the visual images that can be in forms of static and dynamic. In general, they have specific meaning under certain context, people use them to express themselves. Shortcuts refer to the buttons on social media platform that allow people to share their comments quickly. Four of them share a common feature that they can all shorten or eliminate typing time because each of them requires people to type fewer letters than formal English.