TED Talk Reflection. Ivan Semashev
This talk was very interesting, especially for me, myself, since I have had a small itch to talk about some of the questions that John McWhorter has addressed. The questions, such as “Are teenagers these years actually degrading slowly, thus dooming humanity as a whole?” and “Should their ways of communicating and adapting to the world be judged by the prior generations?”
A lot of learned people are talking about the new generation being generally terrible. But if we can take a closer look, these criticisms are not exactly wrong. Some of them are very, very precise. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place …show more content…
I myself am not a native English speaker, and even though I speak on a native-English-speaker level, it was not always like that. In fact, I had to adapt to the English-speaking environment rather quickly when I transferred to this school, which was not easy at all. It is one thing learning the language and another is learning to think in it. And as John said, people do not speak the way they write. They speak the way they think. Despite this, it definitely took me a while to stop being a complete outcast and start talking to a lot of people. One step on the way was learning how does an average teenager speak outside of class, how do teenagers text each other, how do they express emotions outside of class. It is not just a language. It is a mentality, which you either adapt to, or criticise really. I though I would never start using abbreviations like “LOL”, or “LMAO”, or “ikr”. I always tried to text the way I would communicate with a live person sitting in front of me, never using any emojis, occasionally putting in a simple colon and a closing parenthesis right next to it. But after a while, it becomes clearer, that it simply doesn’t work like that. The younger generation adapts their ways of communication to the new technologies, and that should not be …show more content…
There has been a study done on what average people respond to in terms of attempts of communication with them, be it with romantic or friendly motives. Using generic phrases too much will result, in fact, in a negative response to whatever is the offer. It has literally been proven that using some simple every day sentence or word, such as “Hi.” to start a conversation is less likely to get a response that something at least a tiny bit more original, such as “Hola” or “Shalom”. The reason for that being usage of these phrases. I bet you cannot remember how many people said simply “Hi.” to you today. At least I can’t. But I notice when somebody says something original, like “TOP OF THE MORNIN’ TO YA”. The human brain just filters out the generic stuff that it hears all the time, so when you use a phrase like that, your peer will just equate you to the big group of people who are not interesting to him and do not stand out. This is obviously more helpful in situations when trying to start a romantic or friendly relationship, not trying to stay afloat with people that know you and/or are your good friends. A popular student never remembers whose yearbook they have signed at the end of the year because so many people ask them. This is an argument, which proves that when people are inventive with the way they communicate, it helps them
This talk was very interesting, especially for me, myself, since I have had a small itch to talk about some of the questions that John McWhorter has addressed. The questions, such as “Are teenagers these years actually degrading slowly, thus dooming humanity as a whole?” and “Should their ways of communicating and adapting to the world be judged by the prior generations?”
A lot of learned people are talking about the new generation being generally terrible. But if we can take a closer look, these criticisms are not exactly wrong. Some of them are very, very precise. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place …show more content…
I myself am not a native English speaker, and even though I speak on a native-English-speaker level, it was not always like that. In fact, I had to adapt to the English-speaking environment rather quickly when I transferred to this school, which was not easy at all. It is one thing learning the language and another is learning to think in it. And as John said, people do not speak the way they write. They speak the way they think. Despite this, it definitely took me a while to stop being a complete outcast and start talking to a lot of people. One step on the way was learning how does an average teenager speak outside of class, how do teenagers text each other, how do they express emotions outside of class. It is not just a language. It is a mentality, which you either adapt to, or criticise really. I though I would never start using abbreviations like “LOL”, or “LMAO”, or “ikr”. I always tried to text the way I would communicate with a live person sitting in front of me, never using any emojis, occasionally putting in a simple colon and a closing parenthesis right next to it. But after a while, it becomes clearer, that it simply doesn’t work like that. The younger generation adapts their ways of communication to the new technologies, and that should not be …show more content…
There has been a study done on what average people respond to in terms of attempts of communication with them, be it with romantic or friendly motives. Using generic phrases too much will result, in fact, in a negative response to whatever is the offer. It has literally been proven that using some simple every day sentence or word, such as “Hi.” to start a conversation is less likely to get a response that something at least a tiny bit more original, such as “Hola” or “Shalom”. The reason for that being usage of these phrases. I bet you cannot remember how many people said simply “Hi.” to you today. At least I can’t. But I notice when somebody says something original, like “TOP OF THE MORNIN’ TO YA”. The human brain just filters out the generic stuff that it hears all the time, so when you use a phrase like that, your peer will just equate you to the big group of people who are not interesting to him and do not stand out. This is obviously more helpful in situations when trying to start a romantic or friendly relationship, not trying to stay afloat with people that know you and/or are your good friends. A popular student never remembers whose yearbook they have signed at the end of the year because so many people ask them. This is an argument, which proves that when people are inventive with the way they communicate, it helps them