After a long day, a young woman gets home from school, exhausted and worn out from the classes and activities she has had to complete. Without skipping a beat, she flops down on her couch, opens her phone and proceeds to look at social media for the next two hours. This case is not an anomaly; an article from Forbes found 4.9 billion people use social media worldwide.
With the sheer influx of usage and the ability to share content and ideas faster than ever before, traditional methods of communication are changing.
“There is an obvious decline of media literacy and the lack of researching to find the truth,” Junior Soren Battaliou said. “A lot of people take things at face value now which, sadly, is a bad thing.”
This lack of media comprehension and literacy has been impacted by social media itself. In a study conducted in 2023, researchers found the “rapid pace of online interactions can hinder critical thinking and thoughtful discourse.” This has led to wars on social media platforms, ugly conflicts with political parties blind to their own faults and consistent streams of hate comments.
“Overall, I think social media has had more of a negative impact on communication and language. Surprisingly, between iffy auto-translation features and the general lack of understanding when reading others’ posts, most of the negative impact actually comes from humans themselves,” Battaliou said.
A negative impact on critical thinking can also be observed.
“I think TikTok, or any sort of short or timed video platform, has really cut down on critical thinking/language development,” Junior Jenna Stilling said. “Sure, there’s been new words that have come from these platforms that really only make sense to the current generations on the app, but one thing I’ve seen a lot is how products or books or movies are advertised. The lack of development of language on these platforms has correlated with attention spans, and instead of providing well-thought out summaries to inform people, attention-grabber words have to be substituted just to get views and stay “relevant.’”
In addition to this negative impact, the Jassim study also found, “Slang, regional dialects, and even internet-specific jargon have found their way into mainstream communication, blurring the boundaries between formal and informal language.”
Formal and informal language is a large part of workplace communication and without distinctions, it is easy to get confused and not understand the social role of language within the workplace.
A team of researchers conducted a five year study and found, “Generally, it is fairly easy for learners to leisurely wander off into the simplified and unrestricted domain of SNS (Social Networking Sites) if left unattended which might also be a contributing factor to overlooking the formality and structure of language hence, the deterioration in language competency.”
Society is already facing the consequences of this collapse of language in school systems. An article written by the George Lucas Educational Foundation showed, “Increased social media use has been associated with … decreased academic performance … and general decreased well-being.”
Ultimately, language is changing, for better or for worse. Some individuals are optimistic about the future of language, even in the face of the negatives social media presents.
“To be honest, I’m not afraid for the future of language,” Battaliou said. “To me, saying language is dying is like saying Latin is a dead language. Just because it’s not spoken commonly doesn’t mean it’s not used, or not important. Latin is all around us, and you can still search through thousands of stories originally written in Latin. It’s all right there at your fingertips—our own Library of Alexandria. Except this time, it can’t burn down.”
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