How to talk

I was reading an article on by Dan Gillmore from the Guardian on Saturday 3, October 2009, about The new rules of news. One of the points he mentions in his 22 ideas for changing the way news is produced is that he “would replace PR-speak and certain Orwellian words and expressions with more neutral, precise language. 

If someone we interview misused language, we would paraphrase instead of using direct quotations. (Examples, among many others: The activity that takes place in casinos is gambling, not gaming. There is no death tax, there can be inheritance or estate tax. Piracy does not describe what people do when they post digital music on file-sharing networks.”

This got me thinking about language in the context of social media and more importanlty “HOW TO TALK.  I then went onto search on Google for “How to talk” the results showed 1 – 10 of about 863,000,000 results.

As humans we learn language through storage (of new words) encoding and retrievel (or repetition of the new words we ave just learned.) 

The problem with social media however is that everybody has a voice and everybody is trying to get reach and standout!  If we are to learn how to talk properly, which in my opinion is to listen first, then we need to understand that the way in which we communicate is changing from long form to short form, with twitter being a classic example whereby you can only communicate using 140 characters.

There still has to be some kind of structure however, otherwise the way in which we talk and how we talk will simply become a series of nonsense syllables and gibberish. With the rise and rise of social media, will we ever really learn how to talk properly.