PWP Second Version

Internet Lingo: a new form of nonverbal communication?

Ten years ago when the Internet was not yet a vital part of our mass media, conversations outside the physical space were only possible through telephone and letters. By these media was difficult to express our feelings as we did in a face to face conversation, because there was not space for gestures and tone of voice that always have strengthened our message.

David Crystal (2005) express that the advent of the Internet has revolutionized communication in many ways; it changed the way people communicate and created new platforms with far-reaching social impact. Significant avenues include but are not limited to SMS Text Messaging, e-mails, chat groups, virtual worlds and the Web.

With the appearance of these mass media, the non-verbal communication is presented through emoticons, internet lingo known as slang or acronyms, memes and pictures that beginning to reinforce the written message. Florencia Morado (2003), express that Nonverbal communication is replaced in a highly stylized form but, above all, creative. It describes actions or physical reactions, moods, feelings with a system of symbols created from keyboard characters that have been re-signified.

This new mode of language is interesting to study because it is an amalgam of both spoken and written languages. For example, traditional writing is static compared to the dynamic nature of the new language on the Internet where words can appear in different colors and font sizes on the computer screen (Franklin Cook, 2001). Moreover is interesting because as teachers in training, we have to know how current students are communicating, in order to understand their social environment and take the most of these elements to create an education according to their interests that make them unable to learn willingly.

My interest in this topic is to see how the use of the Internet Lingo helps us to express our feelings by only some keyboard characters put in a special form, acronyms created to express certain situations and even pictures that just seeing them, express moods. Internet Lingo is a new form of communication that needs to be studied because in some years probably this will be a very important topic in linguistics. I think this topic may be interesting for my colleagues and for anyone that does not know the topic but also think that is important to know this new form of communication. I hope to find important information by investigating in written documents about this topic and asking to some of my friends what they think about.