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Recently, people have been returning to writing basics: handwriting, notebooks, pens, paper, and stationary. While technology can certainly provide an edge for certain tasks, digital overload, addiction, and distraction are growing concerns. many studies indicate that multitasking is bad for us and makes our brains more scattered. In contrast, several studies suggest that pen and paper have an edge over the keyboard. In three studies, researchers found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. Those who took written notes had better comprehension and retention of material because they had to mentally process information rather than type it verbatim. And, another study, published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed that people who doodle can better recall dull information. Writing it down also sparks innovation. Being innovative and creative is about "getting your hands dirty" a feeling that is lacking when you use technology or gadgets, says Arvind Malhotra, a professor at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School."Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of the brain that are associated with creativity. So, touch, feel and the sensation you get when you build something physical has also got a lot to do with creativity," he says.

Gboard, is the keyboard that is used for Android devices. On keyboards, like this one, you may choose which language to type in according to the language you speak. However, not every language can be accounted for since there are so many. In order to help with this problem, an organization partnered with Google to preserve the endangered language of Torwali, which is spoken in Pakistan. This allows the 80,000 people that speak Torwali to connect with each other and keep the language.

Emojis were Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. And it's quickly becoming the universal language of the Internet -- after Apple included an emoji keyboard on its phones five years ago. It's estimated 6 billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis are becoming a secret language for kids.

Emojis, the smileys in Japanese electronic messages and web pages, earned their way into digital culture royalty just a few years back, when various developers created apps for mobile users to download that allowed them the option to add little picture messages into text conversations. When Apple introduced iOS 6, it allowed iPhone users to directly integrate emojis into their keyboard through the OS settings. Now, they're everywhere in pop culture.

"Most people implicitly associate positive ideas with "right" and negative ideas with "left"....The meanings of words in English, Dutch, and Spanish are related to the way people type them on the QWERTY keyboard. Words with more right-hand letters are rated as more positive in emotional valence than words with more left-hand letters, consistent with right-handers' tendency to implicitly associate "good" with "right.""

Talking is arguably one of the most powerful forms of expression, alongside writing and art. We use our voices to ask questions, to deliver bad news, to tell someone we love them. But the way we talk to each other is changing. The uniqueness of our voices is being drowned out by the pitter-patter of keyboards; we're always typing, texting, responding. The positives: devices like cellphones complement face-to-face or ear-to-ear conversations. The negatives: expecting immediate responses; heightened miscommunication, and muted social interaction.

SwiftKey, a keyboard app, did an analysis of one billion emoji from aggregate SwiftKey Cloud data. The interactive map shows which emoji are most frequently used by which state. The full report can be loaded from https://blog.swiftkey.com/the-united-states-of-emoji-which-state-does-your-emoji-use-most-resemble/.

A common occurrence in text messages is the emoji. More people use emojis worldwide than the amount of people that are fluent in the world's most popular language, Mandarin. With the evolution from "keyboard emojis" [i.e. :) and >:( ] to what we currently know as emojis (the little pictures of faces and whatnot), we have developed these "unwritten definitions" for each distinct emoji, such as the different meanings behind each of the smiling emojis (

Language Log is an applied linguistics blog founded by U.Penn's Mark Liberman. This blog post concerns the phenomenon of character amnesia, which is becoming more prevalent in E. Asian countries like China and Japan, which have character-based languages. Basically, character amnesia is the phenomenon of forgetting how to write words, due to the increase in keyboard input of characters, word processing, online correspondence and composition, predictive text technology, and the decline of handwritten documents. This particular article focuses on Japanese kanji amnesia. The bottom of the article contains links to previous discussions of this topic.

Despite claims that emoji are a universal lingua franca, emojis are neither "universal", nor a true "language". Instead, they are "at most a linguistic tool that is being used to complement our language". In other words, emojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation. They help express nuance, tone and emotion in the written word. Emojis offer a chance for the average email writer, SMSer or social media poster to imply an emotional context to their messages, to express empathy. With emojis, they can do this as simply and naturally as using a facial expression or gesture when talking to somebody face-to-face. Yet relying too heavily on emojis to bridge that gap can cause problems of its own. We may all have access to more or less the same emojis through our smartphone keyboards, but what we mean when we use those emojis actually varies greatly, depending on culture, language, and generation.