How We Laugh

I am currently fulfilling my general education requirement in Ancient History. After getting passed all the boring lectures and readings these last couple of weeks it is actually quite interesting to learn about the early struggles of humans. They were so worried about keeping records and writing everything they did to keep order and to be able to run empires based on obedience and order. So it got me thinking on how we communicate now.

When looking at the impact technology has had on the life we live now we never think of how technology has changed every language. More words have been added to people’s vocabularies strictly dealing with technology. It is safe to say that not only has technology changed how fast we communicate or how often but also introduced a whole new language. Social media and text messages have introduced a whole new dynamic to the language of how anyone communicates with each other.

Imagine a world without “LOL”.  Technology has paved a tremendous short cut to more efficient ways to use language in a written form. It is mind blowing to think that before phones or social media there was really no way to show someone you are laughing in written form. We take the “haha” or  “lol” as something so second nature and just something we do but when you really sit and think, how would you express that through written form. Would you just say “I am laughing…”?

Another pretty interesting example is the word Google. We have transformed it from a proper noun to a verb from just simply using it over and over again. All this has been done by the impact of technology. We as humans have not really sat down and made decisions of this is how we are going to write/spell something or if we are going to change the attribute of a word. It has just happened over time.