Social Media and Short Hand Texting-Language Minimized to Nothingness
The tragedy of modern day youth is their luck of proverbs. In the world of social media and short hand texting, language has been minimized to the point of nothingness. Words have been reduced to a few syllables. Activities like sex-ting and texting have brought into the linguistic scene, LOL (laugh out loud), IDK (I don’t know), LMK (let me know), which have replaced real words. It has become easy to use curse words. For example STFU (shut the fuck up) are used commonly to conceal disgusting communications. The use of these curse prefixes’ is more common in the United States, which is the father of all curse words and social cultural deconstruction.
The move towards legitimizing all manner of evil can historically be attributed to the American entertainment industry. Hollywood has done more harm to morality and destruction of cultural norms than any other industry. The move for example towards legitimizing marijuana use can be attributed not only to the American cultural development in the entertainment industry, but also to the American media. For example, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta played a vital role in legitimizing drug use, especially the use of marijuana. Given his profile as an authentic neurosurgeon and news analyst, Gupta argued in his CNN program that marijuana use does not have any effect on the brain. He advocated for the Obama Administration to lessen the tight control over the industry. American cultural landscapes shape most of the world’s movement in cultural norms because of our addiction to entertainment.
Let us take for example the American obsession with dogs. Many American families who have dogs spend hundreds of dollars and treat dogs better than they treat their children. The idea that a dog has now been accepted by many as a “member of the family’ is due to the propaganda that dogs are ‘man’s best friend’. When we analyze the statement that dogs are man’s best friends, we see why some Americans prefer to have dogs than children. Many of them invest in a dog than invest in orphans. It is easier to accept the death of a child from abortion than the death of a dog. Killing of a dog is seen as animal cruelty, while killing of an unborn child is accepted as maternal rights of a woman. This issue is not to be seen only from the perspective of a secular American family. Rather, it is true that there are many Christian families whose budget for their dogs and pets is greater than the budget they have for the Kingdom of God.
These movements towards legitimizing ills do not happen in the vacuum. Rather, radical idealists who purpose, historically, is movements away from the Bible orchestrate them. According to one great archeologist, “Along with the pig, the most ritually unclean animal, the dog is a scavenger who feeds on carrion. By the time of the New Testament, even if it lives alongside people, it is only fed the scraps (see Mt 15:26). It will even eat human corpses (1 Ki 14:11), as well as its own vomit (Prov 26:11, 2 Pt 2:22). The dysphemism ‘dead dog’ is a terrible insult (2 Sam 16:9) or description of extreme self-humiliation.” (Berković, D) 2014. Beware of dogs! ‘The position and role of dogs in biblical discourse’ KAIROS – Evangelical Journal of Theology / Vol. VIII. No. 1, pp. 75-84).
Yet this dirty and unclean animal is now a “member of some families.” Today, the American entertainment landscape is moving to legitimize homosexuality with programs that legitimize gay sex.
It is true that change is inevitable! The movement towards the future is a guaranteed divine principle. God created the heavens and the earth and instituted the principle of mobility (movement). Movement is not just within concept of distance, but it involves movements in all things. After the fall of man, God instituted a movement towards man’s end in death. From the moment a person is born, the clock starts ticking towards an ultimate end. With this ticking comes the change in body’s outlook, performance and time: Change.
However, within transformational mobility is a constant message of the Bible. The eternal WORD spoken by God in the beginning remains constant. It is in this context then that we need to be careful as we adjust ourselves to the modern era of language and linguistic communication within social media. It is true that modernity is a necessary principle within human development and we cannot eliminate the principle of movement. However, we can take the Biblical WORD and its Constance and use it as a fulcrum to protect linguistic constant so that the Word of God does not become TWOG (the word of God), for in that instant, we will loose the spectrum of words that express in words, what is true. For example the Kikuyu proverb, “Jamba ti Ikere” (A man is not his thighs), cannot be understood if it is written, JTI, without a proper linguistic analysis that involves words. It is this social deconstruction of language that has robbed our young proverbs.
Teddy Njoroge Kamau (PhD)
HTBluff Associates
Diaspora Messenger Senior Columnist
Social Media and Short Hand Texting-Language Minimized to Nothingness
