Headline, April25, 2014

"' THE DIGITAL EMPIRE OF THE 

ENGLISH CHANGE "'

One gets great pleasure from conversations with neighbours and passers-by.

What is noticeable,however, is that even making eye contact with people listening to iPods or viewing their mobile phones is now impossible.

This technological social isolation spills into the shopping streets as well.  

WE can argue that the Internet supports other form of social networking that vastly outweighs this disadvantage. One example is Twitter, which supports broadcasting of text messages:

Up to 140 characters long to  "followers"   -friends or strangers. According to one special report on social networking, Ashton Kutcher has over 4.6million followers, and Oprah Winfrey has over 3.7 million. However, this seems to be more display than conversation.

There are other kinds of social networking sites, including the popular Facebook. The idea is to maintain a personal page that provides a kind of dynamic autobiography with text and pictures, automatically-

Sending updated information to online people registered as friends. Again, this doesn't seem like real conversation to me, and given that, Australian social  networkers -some years ago- :

Spent an average of 7 hours month, this must decrease their opportunity for real social networking.

In any case, many highly respected publications- have increasingly published special reports on social networking on the Internet, and that many articles in those reports discuss its use within business, shows that is here to stay. 

There are undoubtedly great potential benefits.

The danger is that use outside business of various forms of social networking on the Internet will reduce both the incidence if ordinary conversation and the skills in such conversation.

This danger would be lessened by creating and promoting forms of :

Online social networking that more closely resemble ordinary conversation by displaying spoken language and body language  -at least the facial part of it. 

This is a form of  video conferencing  which is of a particular interest to business and government.

Writing : much of the social networking I've described is done with written language. However, the information is typically transient, provocative and emotional.

Such information is often written informally. Perhaps the online world of blogging, twitter, and e-mailing would benefit greatly from the adoption of a systematic alphabetic shorthand rather than ad hoc abbreviation.

Not only could this be optimised for brevity, which is important for small handheld devices, but a standard would enable optional expansion for beginners and translation for foreigners.

If handheld tablet devices...........! The honour and serving of this Post continues:

With respectful dedication the Students of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' Endearing Knowledge "'

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless