a) “The” hasn’t disappeared. The addition of “teh” has expanded the English language, not shrunk it.
b) Even if “the” was 100% replaced with “teh”, that’s not a pidgin. You’re just using a different word to say the same thing. Pidgins are simplified languages, not the use of a different vocabulary set to say the same thing. LOLspeak is a pidgin language, but you can’t or wouldn’t attempt to express the same things in LOLspeak that you can/would in standard English. Unless you decrease the intelligence of everyone in the English speaking world, and hence the level of ideas that they would need to express, you’re going to end up with a language of equal capability as English regardless of whether it uses “teh” or “the” as its particle of choice.
So as I understand the OP, some trendy website has introduced a number of new slang phrases into the English language. And I’m supposed to feel threatened… how?
In addition to the new slang phrases, also of (my) concern is the fast-paced responses using the new phrases. The quick response is due to a) the collective “Anonymous”, all users essentially being like-minded and having the same quick tongue as each other, and b) the terseness of the responses themselves… replacing well thought out responses with quick one- or two-word responses or acronyms which may or may not express the same thing that a longer response would.
It may not seem that important on the internet. But imagine that you are in a conference room with thirty 4channers, each with the same attention span in the real world as that expressed on 4chan, and each shouting out quick snippets of jargon in response to each others question. Just as 4chan is full of noise, so too will the real world become full of such noise.
I don’t 4chan is going to spread very far. Its style is not inherently funny. Saying “I accidentally your cat” was just a typo that became an inside joke. (And so are SDMB memes like “1920s death rays” or “once in the 1960s”.) They’re only funny to people who are already inside the community. When you try to carry them over into a different community, people just look at you strangely.
So online communities like 4chan or SDMB or FARK will thrive to the extent they can offer enough to sustain their membership and draw in new members. These people stick around long enough to become insiders. If they’re very successful, they may even reach the point where their members might form enclaves in other communities (there are enough 4chan people on this board that a 4chan joke will be recognized) but they won’t conquer the world.
You might look up research on the “quick cut” style of TV. MTV and (I believe) Sesame Street were both criticized for the potential to create ADHD demons who wouldn’t be able to concentrate on work or tough subjects.
I think I recall seeing that people had developed “exercise regimens” for kids with ADHD that rewarded the completion of tasks that took concentration, so certainly the reverse is plausible, but a) this means there’s an already known solution, and b) the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket anytime in the immediate future.
Any company that allowed meetings to run like that would quickly go out of business.
So no, I don’t see it happening. There are people who talk to hear themselves speak, and there are those who talk in order to teach, learn and change the world around them. The former group may be making a lot of noise, but they’re still utterly irrelevant. Just because a lot of idiots seem to be congregating in one place, that doesn’t mean that there are more idiots than usual.
Here is a very interesting article that discusses what can happen when Anonymous (the collective of 4chan (and similar sites, like 7chan)) have something to fight for:
Especially relevant to our discussion are these two passages:
7000 people attended a protest wearing masks. 7000 people inspired by someone using terms like “newfag” and “niggertits”. That’s 1/7 of the number of attendees at the Democratic National Convention. That is not an insignificant percentage.
Those words are funny. I know a flamingly [openly] gay high school kid who calls everybody “niggerfag.” It gives me hope that kids today are just using those words to make people laugh instead of belittle people like my generation and earlier did.
And btw, can someone please explain Rio by Duran Duran to me so I don’t have to open a new thread? I missed that boat somehow.
That doesn’t look like 7000 to me. That looks like 5. The protest in question was allegedly attended by 7000 people in over a hundred cities, which is 70 per city, and I say “allegedly” because that’s what people sympathetic to the cause have claimed; it’s never been independently verified that I’ve heard of. 7000 is about the average crowd that a badly run southern-USA NHL team will get to each of 41 home games, all in the same place, and those people have to pay to get in.
By comparison, Toronto’s Caribana festival draws a million people a year. Do you think Caribbean-Canadian culture’s gonna take over the world?
“Anonymous” is about as important and influential a movement as a moderately sized scramble golf tournament.
I somehow missed out on the entire existence of 4chan until I lurked a bit at a message board that picked up some of its memes. I was baffled at the posting style- quick, profuse, insulting and often unrelated. This board got a ton of traffic- threads would have thousands of posts, which to me seemed to say nothing and go nowhere. I couldn’t figure out who spends their time making forty page threads about nothing. Someone finally pointed out that this was 4chan influence.
And yeah, it does worry me. Mostly because I don’t get it. It seems like it was originally a parody of internet culture, but now that parody has become the reality. And get off my lawn, but I don’t find it remotely funny.
And it’s true that 4chan is designed to perpetuate itself. It’s like the welfare queen of memes- just busting them out for the sake of busting them out. Filling the world with it’s rude little half-formed memes. In normal inside jokes, people keep using them because they remember the original incident. It provides group cohesion. But when 4chan memes show up in other places, they mean nothing, recall nothing. It’s a signifier without a signified.
I never thought of the parallel universe angle regarding Wikipedia/Encyclopedia Dramatica. But it’s true. It’s kind of like the Daily Show/Real News relationship, but this one rewards coming up with dumber and less sophisticated jokes rather than smarter and more sophisticated ones.
Now, I don’t think it is going to take over the world. But I still wish it would go away.
