Elements, Contexts and Users of New Media Language

Abstract

Digital technologies have created new contexts for communication. The new digital formats allow the combination of media types and the easy transition between them in everyday tasks. Many think of this as a Media revolution and describe the changes in media due to the Internet as New media or Digital media. Digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we think and behave. As the outcome of Digital revolution a New Media Language there was established, and is increasingly gaining its popularity between the Netizens. By the New Media Language we mean not only the development of new linguistic features, but the spread of different kind of paralinguistic means such as images, photos, hypertext, video, music, graphical signs to communicate the content. There are many different terms like digital literacy, media literacy that have been used alongside with New Media Language to describe the emergent phenomena of changing media use. Internet language, also called netspeak/ chatspeak/ netlish/ weblish/ cyberspeak as an element of New Media Language has become the part of digital discourse, which is composed simultaneously of elements of writing and speech. It has gained enormous popularity and has established itself alongside with the standard oral and prin language forms. The paper aims at analyzing the elements of New Media Language, discusses digital literacies, formation and usage of netspeak, texting, analyses the contexts in which it is being used and created as well as describes the typical users and creators of the Internet language. The analysis has revealed that texting as the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior is not the only way of communication. Teenagers are the heaviest mobile video viewers, they talk less on the phone, but they turn to their cellphones for messaging, Internet, multimedia, gaming, and other activities like downloads. Teens are not only using more data, but they are also downloading a wider range of applications. The teenagers are the most active creators and users of netspeak and texting. They develop digital literacy and are in a way bilingual trying to combine both the standard and Internet forms of language for communication.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.21.2728