Just How Big Is the Impact of Technology on Society?

To comprehend the impact of technology on today’s society, you don’t have to look very far. In fact, you can probably just look around you. Someone is talking on a smartphone or sending a text message. Someone is listening to music on an MP3 player. Someone else is surfing the Web.

A different perspective is to study how technology has impacted our language. And to do that, you can look to new words that have been added to the English language according to University Oxford Press and its annual list of newly recognized words for the English language. Let’s start with the year 2005 and move forward through 2010. (In the lists below, we’ve provided the definitions for only technology-related new words.)

2005

New Word of the Year: Podcast—a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.

Runners-Up for 2005

Bird flu

ICE—an entry stored in one’s cellular phone that provides emergency contact information

IDP (internally displaced person)

IED (improvised explosive device)

Lifehack

Persistent vegetative state

Reggaeton

Rootkit—software installed on a computer by someone other than the owner, intended to conceal other programs or processes, files, or system data

Squick

Sudoku

Trans fat

2006

New Word of the Year: Carbon neutral—calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset.

Runners-Up for 2006

CSA (community-supported agriculture)

DRM—digital rights management

Dwarf planet

Elbow bump

Fishapod

Funner

Ghostriding

Islamofascism

Pregaming

2007

New Word of the Year: Locavore—a person who focuses on eating only locally grown food.

Runners-Up for 2007

Aging in place

Bacn—e-mail notifications, such as news alerts and social networking updates, that are considered more desirable than unwanted spam

Cloudware—online applications, such as webmail, powered by massive data storage facilities, also called cloud servers

Colony collapse disorder

Cougar

MRAP vehicle

Mumblecore

Previvor

Social graph—the network of one’s friends and connections on social Web sites such as Facebook and Myspace

Tase

Upcycling

2008

New Word of the Year: Hypermiling—an attempt to maximize gas mileage by making fuel-conserving adjustments to one’s car and one’s driving techniques.

Page 281Runners-Up for 2008

Frugalista

Moofer

Topless meeting—a meeting in which the participants are barred from using their laptops, Blackberries, smartphones, etc.

Toxic debt

CarrotMob

Ecohacking

Hockey mom

Link bait—content on a Web site that encourages (baits) a user to place links to it from other Web sites

Luchador

Rewilding

Staycation

Tweet—a short message sent via the Twitter service, using a smartphone or other mobile device

Wardrobe

2009

New Word of the Year: Unfriend—to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Runners-Up for 2009

Hashtag—a # sign added to a word or phrase on Twitter

Intexticated—distracted because of texting on a smartphone while driving a vehicle

Netbook—a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

Paywall—a way of blocking access to a part of a Web site which is only available to paying subscribers

Sexting—the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by smartphone

Freemium

Funemployed

Zombie bank

Ardi

Birther

Choice mom

Death panel

Teabagger

Brown state

Green state

Ecotown

Deleb

Tramp stamp

2010

New Word of the Year: Refudiate—used loosely to mean reject (a Sarah Palin faux paux).

Runners-Up for 2010

Bankster

Crowdsourcing—practice whereby an organization enlists a variety of freelancers, paid or unpaid, to work on a specific task or problem

Double-dip

Gleek

Nom nom

Retweet—repost or forward a message posted by another user on Twitter

Tea Party

Top kill

Vuvuzela

Webisode—an original episode derived from a television series, made for online viewing

You can perform some interesting analyses with the above information. For example, the new words of the year for the last six years have been in only three categories: political (2010), the environment with three; and technology with two—podcast (2005) and unfriend (2009). Furthermore, of the 72 runner-up words in the last six years, 17 or roughly 24 percent have been technology-related.

Questions

1. Visit University Oxford Press at http://global.oup.com/?cc=us. For all years after 2010, find the new word of the year and all the runner-up words. Perform the simple analysis we presented in the final paragraph above. How has technology impacted the English language in the years after 2010?

2. While technology has certainly impacted our language in the last several years, so has the environment, perhaps to an even greater extent than technology. Why have so many environment-related words inserted themselves into our language?