this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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Microblog Memes
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Before AI went public people quite willingly gave up thinking as soon as we got texting capability. To save keystrokes we took to abbreviating everything and creating simple slang terms for complex conditions, which trained us to think in those simplistic terms all the time. Now we gloss over most details because we don't think we need them. We know this guy is racist or that woman's a Karen because it's obvious, duh. Why bother considering multiple sides of a situation when somebody else already did the thinking for us and slapped on an easy to consume label? We can make value judgements so much faster now, allowing us to scroll ahead to the next item in our feed, or the next conversation subject, or the next voting decision. Barely scratching the surface is fine if you pretend that's all there is, and demonize anybody who thinks a situation deserves more thought.
uuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhh people invented shorthand slang in the telegraph days, at least the operators did
uuuuuhhhhhhh and they invented contractions even earlier!!1!
Common people sending or receiving telegrams was miniscule compared to the tens of millions of people who started texting when it became available. Being contrary is fine but not when it makes zero sense.
How are contractions "slang"? Make sense yourself, moron.
Contractions aren't slang, they're another example of a way to condense speech, that didn't negatively impact anything any more than telegraph shorthand did.
Sorry if I'm misjudging you, but this sounds like an appeal to futility. Hey, people are already not using their brains, so why not use them even less with AI?
AI is definitely encouraging general cognitive decline, same as any tool degrades a muscle or skill it replaces. The industrial revolution degraded human physical fitness. Social media has degraded human interaction, attention span and thinking skills, and oversimplifies every issue to an acronym or slang label because the prime directive is brevity. But the end state is only futility when people aren't willing to address their own role in the whole process - which they aren't.
I'll be honest, I spoke in txtspk because SMS was 10p a go and I wasn't flush with cash as a teenager!
To be fair, t9 text entry is so much slower than modern touch screen keyboards, nuance was definitely prohibitively time consuming for a while
Also texting cost money at one point and was based on length, so you had to abbreviate.
Forgot about the length limits... Yea it was more of a linguistics/memetics sort of phenomenon, not people being lazy. Like thieves kant, polari etc. language shapes itself to the needs of the people.
Interestingly, serving those texts was literally free for the carriers. They used the empty space at the end of blocks of data the phones were using to stay in contact with the network. That's why it had that very specific character limit.
SMS fees were pure profit for them.