Using smartphone texting applications to help students Contents introduction

Why social media matter

Only decades ago the respectful duty of establishing English grammar rules belonged to writers mostly, and it had been so since written language came into existence. Let’s remember Shakespeare whose neologisms still excite true English language worshippers’ feelings. Writers could confront the established rules, and by doing it, they changed the appearance of the language.Nowadays printed matter did not lose its influence, but technologies made their entrance and undertook the lion’s share of responsibility for the looks of English. Now words, sentences and articles are free to look like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter users want to see them.Even dictionaries now acknowledge the influence of social media on the English language. And here are some facts to prove how powerful this influence is:

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  Collins Dictionary online started a mass crowdsourcing project. People around the world can suggest words that, in their opinion, have to be included in the dictionary and therefore officially become part of English. Needless to say that many suggested items originated from social networking websites. The conclusions to which this project lead are that social media not only introduce thousands of new terms for everyday communication, they are also responsible for spreading these words among Internet users at a cosmic speed.
  
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  People started to put together whole manuals on how to keep a social account. This information is mostly for bloggers and for users whose goal is to attract followers. Nevertheless, the demand for such type of literature is increasing, and so is the amount of it. On WikiHow we learned that there is a whole science how to write a good tweet, which only proves that it matters.
  
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  Social scientists began using social networks as objects of research. Apart from examining these phenomena per se, they collect statistics there to analyze public moods in various spheres of life: starting with politics and ending with people’s personal preferences in books, places, food and so on.
  
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  Finally, let’s consider the amount of time we spend on such websites nowadays. The majority of people in the USA, for example, do not live a day without social media. There we are looking for communication with friends, means of entertaining and self-development, we read news and find goods to order – social media have penetrated into our daily routine to an extent when we hardly can imagine our lives without it. Does it not prove how powerful this force is?