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Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

Considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should face difficulties in this task. Therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from TBI.

"Discourse" is a good search term because it refers to the way people interact using language

The author, a specialist and researcher in linguistics and discourse analysis, was interested in communication between individuals from different cultures. The misunderstandings it provokes are often based on unconscious reflexes and reference points which makes them all the more damaging. Communication between humans would be very difficult, if not impossible, without discursive memory. Our memories allow us to understand each other. Gregory Charles says in a tweet after the attack at the Grand Mosque in 2017, "Every nasty word we utter joins sentences, then paragraphs, pages and manifestos and ends up killing the world." This idea is defined by specialists in discourse analysis by theconcent of interdiscoursement. Not being aware of this discursive mechanism can cause many misunderstandings. Understanding it certainly helps to communicate better. Putting yourself in your audience's place is the key to good communication.

Register--the degree of formality employed in language--is dependent on audience, topic, purpose and location. A successful language user should be able to employ the correct register for particular audiences and purposes. There are five types: 1. Frozen/Static Register: This register rarely or never changes. Examples of frozen register include the Pledge of Allegiance or the Preamble to the Constitution. 2. Formal/Academic Register: This register includes academic language from speeches, proclamations and formal announcements. 3. Consultative Register: This register is formal and acceptable speech often used in professional settings. Some examples of this register include discourse between teachers and students, judges and lawyers, doctors and patients, and between a superior and a subordinate. 4. Casual Register: This register is used among friends and peers, and includes informal language including slang and colloquialisms. Casual register is often used among friends, teammates, etc. 5. Intimate Register: This register is reserved for close family members such as parents and children and siblings, or intimate people such as spouses.

In spoken language, especially in conversations, people are prone to using filler words or - as linguists call them - discourse particles. By inserting these semantically and syntactically neutral words in an utterance, they allow for a speaker to pause while collecting their thoughts while preserving the position of speaker, a coveted social role.

Interesting article on racialized "microaggressions" directed towards gaijin living in Japan.

Dr. Derald Wing-Sue examines the demeaning meta-communications or hidden messages in comments addressed to people of color. Though it should be noted that microaggressions can also be levied at white people, e.g. when Hawaii born-and-raised whites are asked "Where are you from?", and then when told "Here", persist: "No, I meant originally." ;-)

Hey Lara, thanks for remembering me ;-)

Members of Congress are often criticized for what they do - or rather, what they don't do. But what about what they say and, more specifically, how they say it? It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation.

Here's a follow-up on the same study, examining the speech of Hawaii's senators and representatives: http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/157017545.html?id=157017545. U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka speaks at a college sophomore level, according to an analysis of his speeches by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington group that pushes for government transparency. The analysis ranks Akaka in the top five among members of Congress for his use of longer sentences and more complex words. U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye isn't far behind. His speeches use words and sentences on the level of a college freshman. U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono speaks at the level of a high school senior, while U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa's speeches are at the high school freshman level, according to the study. Of course, longer sentences and more complex vocabulary use don't necessarily make for better communication, nor indicate effectiveness in re: serving one's constituents.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American's ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino's ability to speak English without an accent.This is not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour - microaggressions - used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.

Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, summarizes a decade's worth of research in this article. He concludes that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak. It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play. He also explores gender differences in regard to the role of laughter in communication, also laughter as a tool in romance/pair-bonding.

Has a list of entries on the word "like"

"I think this is a unique metaphor-it goes back to the idea that the brain is everything. I see this message all the time in these discourses I am looking at: "You _are_ your brain." It's the ultimate dream-through science we can fully know all that there is to know about human nature, and then control it perfectly."

When we take turns speaking, we chime in after a culturally universal short gap: 200 milliseconds. Research also indicates the rapidity with which typical humans, even chronic interrupters, seem to pick up on key elements of their conversational partner's speech in order to formulate an appropriate and timely response.

Censorship has been a long-standing issue in China, but its citizens continue to fight for self-expression through clever linguistic circumvention of Internet restrictions. Much of Chinese Internet lingo involves codewords, and the corpus of codewords is constantly changing to accommodate new topics and avoid smarter, stricter censors. It has reached the point where a simple understanding of Chinese vocabulary, syntax, and grammar is no longer enough to fully understand Chinese Internet discourse. On today's Chinese Internet, fully comprehending the language requires a thorough knowledge of current events, a deep respect for historical implications, an agile mastery of cultural conventions, and more often than not, a healthy appreciation of topical humor.

Did Donald Trump use the word shithole when referring to African countries in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy, or did he actually say shithouse? These are the scatological depths to which our political discourse has sunk. Let's stipulate that regardless of whether Trump said shithole or shithouse, it does little to change the underlying racist sentiment of disparaging the whole continent of Africa (and Haiti and El Salvador as well, according to some accounts). But just as it's possible to trace the literary roots of shithole, we can observe how the word shithouse has been put into use over the centuries leading up to this peculiar moment in presidential history.

Article talks about teenage girls' linguistic innovation. While some people may decry "creaky voice"/vocal fry, uptalk, and the use of "like" as a discourse particle, the author argues that "Language is inherently unstable. It's in a constant state of flux, made and remade-stretched, altered, broken down and rearranged-by its speakers every day. Rather than a sign of corruption and disorder, this is language in its full vitality-a living, evolving organism... When it comes to language, the rules of natural selection apply: Evolve or perish."

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.