[Xmca-l] Re: Vygotsky and texting

[Haught, John R.]

John McWhorter has a TED talk in which he describes texting as "fingered speech" claiming it is a new form of communication in which we, for the first time, write like we speak. I haven't searched to see what he has written on that but it might be a starting point.




________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu>
Sent: Friday, September 6, 2019 9:49 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Vygotsky and texting


So I am reading Vygotsky with a class. The first time I am reading his work in a few years. We are starting with chapter 7 of thinking and speech, thought and word because – well I wanted to and I am the instructor (can’t beat the perqs). I run across something really interesting that would not have had much meaning pre-Internet – well meaning (or sense, I don’t know), but not as much as today. He is talking about the different forms of communication and he talks about how we abbreviate in verbal speech (our we move inner speech out to social communication) but not really in written speech. This was mostly true the first time I read it. But this time it made me think of blogging and especially micro-blogging. We tend to abbreviate all the time, more than in normal verbal communication, but it is written communication. In class we of course discussed space limitations but it seems more than that. Somebody brought up the example of sub-Reddits some of which have a great deal of abbreviated communication. We also got in to a big discussion of emojis. I mean people use them, but really why do we have them and why do people use them so easily (they were originally organic and then tech companies began standardizing them. It made me wonder, is micro-blogging and blogging actually a new and different form of mediated communication, different from both verbal and formal written communication.  Does anybody know of any work on this. I am having my students do their blog assignments this week using abbreviations and emojis and memes.  I am really interested to see what happens.  Anybody know of any research on this?  Have any thoughts? (I would do an emoji to end but I am really bad at them. But I will say I was pwnd by my students in class when discussing this).



Michael




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