Journal Response (Melissa Kimball)

Mobility vs Writing

Mobility has completely changed writing. Writing styles, language, and even websites have been impacted by mobility. Mobile technology is the recent wave of technological advancement. Cellphones are playing with thin bodies but larger screens. Laptops are becoming Ultrabooks that weigh less than a few pounds. Tablets are becoming the love child of cellphones and laptops for the best of both worlds. Everything is striving to be more mobile, and that’s not limited to the material objects. Writing styles have changed. Now, we write short and sweet. No longer do we copy Joyce and Faulkner. No one has time for that. Newspaper articles are short. School essays have word limits. Tweets are constructed by the letter, and Instagram post need hashtags to tell the viewer what they are viewing. Most importantly, we cannot forget emojis. Emojis are like virtual body expressions—hence the name. Their use has risen from the simple colon and parentheses to the ‘serving girl’ and red one hundred. Modern writing has changed to accommodate these additions as have the readers. We can now seamlessly weave between written words and miniature symbols—often compared to hieroglyphics. Of course, with the emojis and to-the-point language style, modern language has also shifted. Slang exists in every age, but it feels like the amount of slang phrases and words are the most abundant in the present time period. With Twitter and Facebook, IMs and text messages, slang has become an integral part of day-to-day conversation. Before the keyboard phones, where the letter S was something you had to work for, would you see ‘ur’ and ‘brb’ on a daily basis? Text-speech is aptly named because it emerged with the growth of adolescents that owned cellphones. Writing in full sentences with correct spelling was much harder to do hidden under your desk than a few simple letters that meant the same thing. Your chance of being caught by a strict teacher decreased drastically with slang and shorthand. The old slang, although less often used, has evolved and influenced the slang of today. There’s so much that it’s hard to keep up (tbh). One of the most influenced aspects of writing due to mobility, however, is the internet. Websites everywhere have already, or are in the process of, converted to have dual users. By that, I mean that Facebook and Google have desktop sites and mobile sites. Also, in the last few years, these websites have even developed their own apps to work seamlessly on any kind of device. I can open Facebook on my laptop, on my tablet, and on my phone and they all look differently but work easily, some conforming to touch screen displays while others mostly depend on a mouse. All in all, mobility has effected the way we write today—it has caused us to find new ways to be more efficient in our writing.