Lecture 9: Computer Mediated Communications

IT use and computer mediated communications has become so much a part of our lives that many do not realize how embedded it has become. SMS, MMS, phone calls, instant messengers, skype. the world has indeed shrunk many-fold, and the issue here (i feel) is that it is changing at too fast a pace.

Many social problems do happen not because society is changing. that is normal actually. the problem is that it is changing too fast, so fast that society is unable to catch up to the changes.

i recall a study i once read, that in such a fast-paced world, where efficiency is prized, even language is not spared. for example, in singapore, acronyms are so common! what about our short-forms for almost everything? nowhere else in the world do people label their universities with acronyms. when we ask foreigners where they study, we get answers like "harvard" or "university of Berkley". never HU or UB. even our sentence structure of Singlish is a shorter and more efficient version of standard english. it has been shortened, not for 'fun', or just because it happened, but usually to cut out words that are "waste of time".