I enjoyed listening to the Aspen Initiative UK Podcast on The Future of Language, especially the thoughts by Tony Thorne @tonythorne007, which reminded me of my recent post: Emojis: Intellectual Crutch or An Expansive New Language?
He bought up the point that language in the digital age, particularly the language used on social media, has become multimodal. For example, emojis can be conceived is as a way to represent body language. He also brings up the hypothesis that online “writing”, especially within social media domain, isn’t so much a form of writing as a new form of speech.
Anyway, for people who love to think about the context of social media within our culture, and how language and culture are related, this is a wonderful podcast, well worth one hour of your time.