CYBERLANGUAGES : FEATURES AND IMPLICATION

Cyber play: Variation on abbreviations, emoticons, and smiley~ ABBREVIATIONS Definition: A shortened form of a word or phrase. P-phone, for example, is an abbreviation of Proprietary phone. Acronyms, contractions, and initialisms are special forms of abbreviations comprising the initial letters or other parts of several words that constitute a term.  A great deal of communication on the Internet consists of people typing messages to one another — texting, email, and Twitter, as well as Facebook, Usenet articles, instant messaging, IRC, chat rooms, discussion groups, and so on. There are also a number of widely used communication conventions that are useful to know, for example, hashtags, or the spelling words with as few characters as possible                 (r u 4 rl?). You will also encounter a lot of slang, much of which is created by young people, who have always felt the need to communicate differently from their parents. In a similar vein, there are many common abbreviations and acronyms, which are used both as slang and to save time when texting or tweeting. I have collected the most important ones in the table below. The Internet has always been a source of technology inspired slang. Even back in the early 1980s, Internet users had their own particular argot and abbreviations. Some of these terms eventually find their way into a more enduring part of the culture, where they are used for years by people of all ages.  abbreviations a.k.a acronyms  EMOTICONS # On the Net, there is a convention that, while talking, you put words that describe an emotion within angled brackets, < >, in order to set the words off from regular text. #  You may also see asterisk characters * * used instead of < >. facebook emoticons  SMILEY =) # In addition to abbreviations and acronyms, you will commonly see people use a smiley. This indicates that what the person is saying should not be taken as offensive. #  Smileys are especially useful when you want to say something sardonic, such as a devastating observation, wrought with irony, that a lesser mind might interpret as criticism.   YEAH! awesome rite? Lists of Smileys http://www.muller-godschalk.com/emoticon.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/ascii/smileys.html SITUATION: Alya loved to chat with her online friends. She has a lots of friends from all over the world. On 1 fine day, she share stories with her friends from United States like usual. But, her friends used abbreviations that she did not even understand and this has lead to misunderstanding between them. This has affected their friendship. In your opinion, abbreviation is a positive thing or negative?