DSA Online | New Media Updates

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they find themselves saying things that don’t 100% fit coming out of their mouths. As troublesome as hearing your parents use slang pulled directly from your mouth, using words that are casually tossed around between your kids is not necessarily the best bank from which to pull.

To save you from having the kind of “awkward cocktail moment” best suited for the movies, here’s a handy list of words, why they are being used and when you should refrain from dropping these into your conversation.

Interweb:
As this term starts to make it’s way to popular television, I have heard more and more people starting to use this term, which causes me no end of delight.

For those “in the know”, the term Interweb was adopted to make fun of those (adults) who were confusing the “World Wide Web” catch phrase of the 90s with the more popular catch-all “Internet”.  Living mostly as a pejorative term to mock those on the outside in forums and chat rooms, it has recently started to surface in regular conversation.

When to use this: When you’re mocking N00bs (or you’ve seriously knowledgeable about the web-topic you’re discussing).
Avoid: Using it in front of your kids.

Pluralz:
The whole “adding a z to the end of words” thing is a meme that pops up occasionally. Perhaps you have recently heard about “Im in yr fridge eating ur f00dz”…or perhaps not. This particular meme found real momentum after a while (it was based on a joke pulled from a gaming forum) and is said to be the cause of LOLcats (http://icanhascheezburger.com/).

You can find out all about this meme here.

In any case, if you hear people saying this aloud and they are over the age of 24 , then be warned. This is not a good thing. This is not something that you should be writing down for future use. Crash recovery positions!!

As with most L33t speak (also known as leetspeak, net speak using ASCII characters to represent Latin letters), this kind of knowledge will give you stature in a forum discussion, but will lend you little credibility when chatting with your interactive department (or client).

When to use this: When ur in teh fridge eating teh foodz. Online.
Avoid: Saying this aloud (or practice in private first).

owned:
Most people credit the widespread and most recent popular use of the word ‘owned’ to World of Warcraft. The etymology of the word is odd as it began it’s initial online run spelled ‘pwned’. The mistype is intentional, as if the writer was so excited to state their obvious superiority. It means “I win, you suck” plus a little victory dance.

When to use this: When you’re bonding with your buddies, son or playing Xbox. You did not own me by taking my stapler, Frank.
Avoid: Shouting it out the window at the dude you just cut off in traffic.

emoticons ALOUD:
The first time I heard this, in a serious way, was at the movie theatre. I believe my little addition to little wizards and muggles had me waiting in line an hour before the show. Behind me, there was a little girl, around 10, and her dad chatting. I could hear the dad struggling to come up with things of interest to talk about (for both them), when he misstepped and asked her about a friend who had obviously fallen out of favour. I can only imagine the look on the little girl’s face, but I heard her response quite clearly:

O-M-G, dad! O-M-Gee.

My mouth actually dropped open. While my colleagues and I have been known to throw around the occasional WTF, it is with reservation that our shorthand best used for texting falls into conversation. I credit this to the increase in cell phones across all ages; however, I am more likely to forgive my 5 year old nephew if he drops a LOL than I am to refrain from laughing at a work chum who can’t help but “L-O-L”.

When to use this: Instant Messenger. Txt.
Avoid: like, OMG, using this in regular, XD, conversation.

web 2.0:
When I first heard this used at a meeting several years ago, I sat back amused listening to a conversation between an account rep and client. Both of them kept using Web 2.0, but neither of them had the same definition in mind and so, they kept repeating their questions over and over again, until finally I stood up and said something. You could tell that other people in the room had been thinking it, but no one actually wanted to say the obvious aloud; What the HECK is Web 2.0?

Tim O’Reilly, the man who coined the phrase, said “One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is that users add value…Web 2.0 companies build systems that get better the more people use them”.

Over the past few years, my definition has been worked down to this:
“Web 2.0 is the deluxe expansion. If Lego© Basic Bricks was Web 1.0, then Web 2.0 is the Ultimate Lego© Town Building Set. Everything that existed and was great about the internet 2, 5, 10 years ago, is still available and required, but Web 2.0 adds on top of this. To use my LEGO© description, it adds people, new platforms, feedback and action.

Web 2.0 is sharing, authoring, blogging, coding, consuming, monetizing, growing upgrade.

So, stop using it because it’s a catchall that doesn’t really mean anything important to your clients or colleagues.”

The reason I say stop using it is because, just like with the term “internet”, the word is bigger and more vague than anything you would ever want to suggest to your partners. You would never say “I want to include traditional media” to your boss and have the ad buy be complete. There are better descriptions for the separate components that fall under the net of Web 2.0 and you can show more online savvy by detailing these.

When to use this: When you need a vague catchall phrase to describe desirable modern online media.
Avoid: Using, especially if you can be more specific (such as mobile, social, viral, email…etc…)