Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Digital Divide: Some Reflections, Stephen Paul Foster Ph.D.

University Libraries' Staff Publications

One of the many remarkable impacts of the Internet on our social lives has been its shaping of our language. A spontaneously evolving Internet-argot has relentlessly and conspicuously intruded itself into everyday life. The activities and circumstances of a people "on-line" are now described by an array of powerful and colorful metaphors that capture the spirit of a new, robust technology. We find ourselves often conversing casually and unselfconsciously in an idiom that would have been incomprehensible only a few short years ago. We do, indeed, talk differently now.

One Internet-spawned expression that seems to have achieved common linguistic currency …