Project 5: Old Language, New Language?

Step 2) Find five good newspaper articles since January 2010 which directly address all of the following areas: (a) new technology and (b) language. You may need to vary your actual search terms to get more hits. Since journalists don’t necessarily use the term "new media," I suggest you use the more layman terms as keywords: "netspeak, netlingo, cybertalk, cyberspeak, weblish, techspeak, wired style, e-talk, textese, etc." The list can go on. Be creative. You can also search the technical terms such as "IM, SMS, etc." as keywords, and combine it with "language" when you search. You can also try "internet + language" and see what you got. The main thing is to find articles that are specifically addressing the question of language in new media. Step 3) Save copies of the articles you find and attach them to your project. Be sure that the source and date of each publication is recorded at the bottom of your report. There are two ways of doing this: 1) in LexisNexis, on the right upper hand of the article, you’ll see the "save" icon, it’ll give you choices of saving it as a word or PDF document — save each of the five articles in this way. And attach these five files in addition to your project report — so you’ll upload 6 files all together. 2) or if the "save" function doesn’t work on your computer, you can copy and paste the five articles and combine them into one Word document, with each article’s source (which newspaper) and the publication date on it.– this way you submit two documents. However, I prefer you go the first method. Step 4) You can do this search on google, like I said in class. But let me warn you it’s not going to be easier, because all kinds of links can come up, not just news articles. While the LexisNexis database is specifically for finding news articles. If by any chance some of your articles are from direct search on google, then I prefer you also save the articles or bundle them into on Word document, and upload them on canvas. If you absolutely can’t save it, then provide the correct links to each each article with the article title, source, and date written out besides the links. This is a dispreferred method. It’ll cost you lots of time. Step 5) Read through your articles carefully and identify all interesting metalanguistic commentary (i.e. instances where journalists or others are writing/talking about and evaluating new media language: these people can have positive or negative views about it). Write a short report in which you discuss (using extracts from the articles) what you notice. — please do not cite long paragraphs from the news articles to take up space. When needed, paraphrase it. Metalanguage: language or symbols used when language itself is being discussed or examined. So far, only human beings among primates (and all animals) are found able to use metalanguage/make metalinguistic comments, i.e. to use language to talk about language, or do language games, language play.