Has Wikipedia influenced the way we gather information - Research Paper Example

These changes have helped us to get better and better. Mobile phone can be claimed to be the icon of Information Technology as today globally there are over 6 billion mobile connections and around 4 billion of these belong to unique consumers, it can be implied that two out of three people on earth have cell phone. The cell phone subscribers are increasing rapidly. SMS is a very popular service that cell phone users avail, in 2012, 2.19 trillion SMS were sent and received by the American population (Wireless Federation, 2013).

In the course of communicating through short messages a surprising phenomenon has surfaced. It is that SMS - supposedly the cheapest mode of communication as a result of which this modality of communication is most popular amongst young subscribers, especially students. An extract from a school girl’s SMS is: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." [3] …….(BBC, 2003) It may be challenging for a sexagenarian to comprehend this message, few may take it as an output from a web based transliteration tool.

A closer look at the text being exchanged by students comprise of shortcuts, homophones, omissions, emoticons, typos, native language, initials, acronyms, simpler tenses as well as verbs and the punctuation has been used in a different form. In this information age, this new choice of communication has come up and it has many names, like txt talk, txtese, txto, chatspeak, txt lingo, SMSish, txtslang etc. The young children and students use a different type of language while texting, the fact is visible from the above cited text.

Accordingly, numerous academicians, experts and others have echoed their concerns about the possibility of language deterioration. Extant peer-reviewed literature published on research carried out by researchers in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia posits that textese is popular not only in developed countries but it is equally popular in developing countries (Ahmad, Nurullah & Sarkar, 2010) (Aziz, Shamim , Aziz & Priya , 2013) (Jungesj, 2011). Textese is gradually showing up as a disruptive medium, it has not only entered the social networking domain but is starting to topple email writing.

With the kind of acceptance and extent of adoption, linguists are intrigued at the way the communication through texts is impacting the language of the users. As per linguists, textese has a convention but it is not structured and it is less sophisticated. The reason that language in textese has evolved is that because the convention is very user friendly, to the extent that typing a textese appears to be as east as talking. Another good reason for the popularity of textese could be that a user can key in the message at very high speed.

In other words, because of the stipulated length of text that is 160 characters – a user can pack lot more information when compared with grammatically correct English. Furthermore, a deeper analysis of textese indicates that it has numerous short-forms like LOL – Laugh Out Loud, ROTFL – Rolling On The Floor Laughing. A specific website lists over 1100 smileys and acronyms those form a part of textese. Expressions like LOL can be seen as a marker of accommodation, some call these as pragmatic particles as they are