As long as there are words to express human sentiment, there will be people trying to find ways to maximize efficiency of communication, to streamline our language into nearly unrecognizable shorthand like "u down 2 hu l8r?"
Of course, slang has been culturally universal for centuries, as each society develops easy shortcuts to understand each other. There has long been a tendency in civilization to normalize or universalize communication. The first incarnation of this tendency in recent human memory (read: that I know about) was the drastic failure to implement a global language, Esperanto, which was invented in the 1870s.
However, the most notable and successful push towards really developing a global society was the stunningly rapid rise of the Internet, and for the past 15 years our own coming-of-age has been distinctly marked by the coinciding coming-of-age of the Web, or the "information superhighway," or any one of those terms that almost immediately become obsolete after being coined.
That's the power of the easy-access information generation. We know a lot of things superficially instead of profoundly, and we flit from idea to idea more fluidly and easily than the generation before us. We can look to Wikipedia or Google for a quick filling-in of detail or confirmation on a subject (like when Esperanto was invented and the subsequent random memory that it was the name of a car on Grand Theft Auto) and then forget it just as quickly. The undergrad research paper has become much, much less in-depth in terms of the actual length of time and amount of effort put into research.
But all of these observations are mundane at best, hashed and rehashed as often as your grandmother's confusion about computer-phones. My point is the effect this has had on human communication and, in turn, human relationships. I hear all the time about how the Internet brings us together as a global community in some way, and to an extent I buy into it. For almost the whole of human history, we haven't been able to imitate being together without actually being together, until now.
Only in the past few years have we developed technology like Skype and Facetime in order to recreate (touchlessly) a face-to-face interaction. Chatroulette brings that artificial face-to-face interaction to another level, allowing us to pass by strangers in the cyber world, except we are freer to be voyeurs, to directly acknowledge each other's watchful presence.
But this isn't exactly communal. What about everything else? T exts, instant messages, tweets, Blitzes, wall posts there are now countless new ways to communicate with each other without actually having to show up, without ever having to delve into real conversation. Zuckerberg brought the world a way to sustain an untenable number of "friendships" through the substitution of small talk for real talk. Before, we could never talk to someone in a different place without actually hearing that person's voice excepting, of course, through writing letters but would anyone ever limit a letter to 140 characters? Would anyone ever take the time to write a letter to an old acquaintance who didn't mean that much to them?
We take for granted the ability to instantly communicate with each other, never bothering to say everything we mean because there will always be another chance. There is something so much more personal, so much more seemingly at stake, when we communicate in person. And we've found a way to circumvent it all, sometimes leaving us paralyzed in the all-too-daunting real world stop-and-chat. Our familiarity with acquaintances exists almost entirely between our constructed online personae and not between our flesh-and-blood bodies, leaving us with the sense that, yes, we are able to connect to so many more people but behind a false, pixilated and faceless buffer.
Instead of globalizing humanity, the Internet has individualized us. We consciously maintain these distinct personae who offer little or nothing in the way of genuine expression of internal emotion, and we often don't focus on maintaining real relationships. It's impossible not to identify with each other through these versions of ourselves as if they are as real as our living bodies and small-talking mouths walking around. My own persona begins to matter so much more I find myself looking through my profile pictures to get a sense of the iconified me that I have spent years honing, because she substitutes for me in so many situations and relationships. You can replicate yourself in so many forums, and we watch the brand-named versions of other people's personae on reality television, which further encourages the notion that our lives are shallow narratives at best. Sorority rush brings this issue to the forefront of my mind, because I automatically zero any moron who uses emoticons on her Facebook profile. No but really, I do that, because I'm awful and superficial and so is rush. That's my point I buy into it too, because it's so hard to take each other seriously, and it's easy not to have to. But I mean, look at this:
:(
Exactly.
