What is happening to language?

[marions ghost]

This question overlaps areas in social psychology, cognitive anthropology, media & linguistics I'm sure. My own perspective is as a writer of articles in ye olde English. I am interested in, but not really up on the latest in those more scientific fields of research.

What I've noticed is that so much information is coming at us all the time now and people are so busy dealing with it that our styles of interaction and communication are changing radically.

With some people of like-minded affinity there is what I see as a complete short-circuiting, ie. a form of communication involving partial thoughts, verging on mind-reading. The main feature is absolutely NO SPACE between thoughts. It's as if the whole culture is developing a type of pressure speech. Everyone is too busy to talk at all unless you have something VERY important to say, and you'd better spit it out quick. Nobody sits around chatting anymore. Nobody has the patience to listen. Everyone tries hard to talk in sound bites, lest they offend others by using up an extra SECOND of their time that is not productive. Conversations are more focused but also more perfunctory, more rushed. You can practically feel the loss of attention in others as soon as the slightest bit of tangential info is related. People seem to have drastically different "verbal input" tolerances.

And then there's the very different pace of online chat. Typing words tends to make for more complete thoughts, and you CAN say as much as you like on your blog or whatever (nobody may ever read it, but you can say as much as you like).

So does anybody have any theories about where this radical change in verbal communication is heading?
Will we just be projecting thoughts one day, rather than actually speaking? Are there any definitive books that are dealing with this topic?

[marions ghost]

1. A definition...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_anthropology

Psychological anthropology is a highly interdiscplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. In particular, psychological anthropologists tend to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group, with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories, shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of how cultural and social processes work. It is comprised of several schools or subfields, each of which has varying approaches within.

[LiberalEsto]

2. Orwell called it Newspeak

in his novel "1984"

[westerebus]

3. A penney for your thoughts.

Are you familiar with that expression? How would you text message that expression? You would have to be short on symbolics and long on idiom's. So it carries through in the language. The culture reflecting itself in a language of machine speech, the means it communicates with on the broadest of scales. Media. Electronic media. Sound bite to text bite. That's my nickels worth.