Definition Essay: Social Media

Social Media and Language With the advent of technological innovations that have evolved exponentially in the last decade or two, the world has been thrust into an era of virtual and mechanical prowess. Along with this revolution in the sciences and computing, we, as humans, have created wonderful technologies, and made life-changing discoveries. However, with the findings of medicinal, industrial, and virtual ideas that have propelled society into this "Technological Revolution", there has also emerged a new system of communication and language in the advent of Social Media. This sub level of virtual/internet innovation has been a point of controversy as many of its critics delineate its "apparent" negative effects that persist of a user's constant desire to text, tweet, update, notify whatever is on their minds. Critics mention how it is decreasing social interactions, reducing proper uses of grammar, causing communication to decrease, and overall seem to state how social media has caused the downfall of social interaction and has been especially harmful to the overall use of language. In a more general sense language has been defined as the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication and many understand language to be a permanent entity. Critics have come to the conclusion that social media has bred a generation of linguistic rebels inventing new terms such as "troll", or "hashtag", using acronyms such as "omg" or "lol". They believe this goes against "proper" language and castigate those who allow such blasphemous contemporary uses of language. Despite these seemingly "justifiable" reasons for chastising the introduction of social media, the critics are far from the truth. Beginning with the basics, many believe that with the changes that are occurring within societal language in this point in time are unprecedented and signify a loss of culture and a deterioration in overall intelligence of those unwilling to "maintain a