I despise that as an old man having serious conversations with younger people, they will say words like “unalive” without even the knowledge or hint of an idea that it’s a weird thing to say, because they heard their parents say it, they saw the memes their parents made that say “unalive” and other substitutes for serious words.
I can see from here the shape of my disconnect from the next generations, despite all I have done in my life to stay up with current trends, language and ideas, this is the area that leaves me behind, and it’s entirely a product of capitalism.
It’s even worse than that. Terms like unalive are a product of social media algorithms. There are certain terms that the algorithms don’t like and social media influencers come up with alternative words to conform to the algorithm. Children don’t understand that these terms are meant to be substitutes for other words when making social media content so say them in day to day life.
If I had several lifetimes I would spend one of them studying the history of the English language. You could get such a deep insight into cultural life over time.
I have had a theory for a long time that this just makes me believe it more. My theory is that so much viral shit we see online is not organic. It’s all cooked up by rooms full of twenty something ad agencies and how do you measure effect on viral campaigns? You need a way to search reach and what better way than making up dumb new words that nobody ever uses so you can query it later on. Watch in an election year and count all the new words used and ask if they’re vague or if they’re words that can be used to measure reach
I despise that as an old man having serious conversations with younger people, they will say words like “unalive” without even the knowledge or hint of an idea that it’s a weird thing to say, because they heard their parents say it, they saw the memes their parents made that say “unalive” and other substitutes for serious words.
I can see from here the shape of my disconnect from the next generations, despite all I have done in my life to stay up with current trends, language and ideas, this is the area that leaves me behind, and it’s entirely a product of capitalism.
It’s even worse than that. Terms like unalive are a product of social media algorithms. There are certain terms that the algorithms don’t like and social media influencers come up with alternative words to conform to the algorithm. Children don’t understand that these terms are meant to be substitutes for other words when making social media content so say them in day to day life.
So… AI is changing our language.
If I had several lifetimes I would spend one of them studying the history of the English language. You could get such a deep insight into cultural life over time.
I have had a theory for a long time that this just makes me believe it more. My theory is that so much viral shit we see online is not organic. It’s all cooked up by rooms full of twenty something ad agencies and how do you measure effect on viral campaigns? You need a way to search reach and what better way than making up dumb new words that nobody ever uses so you can query it later on. Watch in an election year and count all the new words used and ask if they’re vague or if they’re words that can be used to measure reach