The World Wide Web has become a new member of the family for most of the countries worldwide growing day by day and turning into a creature who speaks its own particular language. Technical language, or better said, the words that are used when talking about technical matters, have changed so much in the last 15 years that sometimes it is hard to keep up with the new trends.
Besides, if you are not a digital native, or have not adapted to the technological era, you are at risk of becoming an outcast in the community. Let’s give an example.
If you don’t know what Twitter is, how it works or why it is relevant, chances are it has been a hard year for you or that you are part of this unlucky group mentioned above . Even if you are not a great fan of social networking sites or computers, being aware of technology is necessary nowadays. On the other hand, the average user sometimes has trouble understanding technical jargon. To top it all, technology industries tend to make up new tech buzzwords to define specific services or name certain products, making matters even worse.
To illustrate this, would you know what the terms ‘hotfix’, ‘service pack’, ‘solutions’, ‘feeds’ mean? These are only a few instances, but surely these kind of terms are not familiar to everybody, as referred to in The Global Language Monitor. If dealing with technical instructions can be tedious and complicated – remember your parents asking how to play a video tape? 🙂 – add a couple of new wave tech words and there you have recipe for disaster.
Just a reflexion… what is your view on this matter?
2 comments
Early forties. Had the first Atari, the first Spectrum, played the very first tape games on green screens, enthusiast with the Amiga, then the 8086, 286, 386 DX, SX, 486, Pentium, Pentium I, then II…and then everything went way too fast for me…the technology jumps were just too high, there was no time to enjoy your latest buy because there was an air of obsolescence floating around…
So yes, I am familiar with (and use) Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc..but still like my Windows XP, my 25″ Sony tv with colour tube, my 2005 Compaq laptop with, YES, a 30GB hard disk and 256 RAM memory (and it works)!!, my mobile with no internet connection and my old Outlook (2004 version…). So far, so good.