Where's the email I sent?

First of all, I would like to take the chance to apologise to Dr Deng for disrupting the class and having to leave early. Nevertheless, I am sad that I had to miss the second class activity that would otherwise help us understand better about the things taught during the last lesson. But as such, I would do my best to write up my weekly reflections with the best of my ability.

Nowadays, the computer is so closely related to our everyday lives that it is almost impossible to live without it. Take the usual lectures for instance, every lecture we have attended has made use of the all-time-popular Microsoft Powerpoint software to create their lectures and uploaded them as notes for students to download. The computer has really evolved so much that even the older generations are encouraged to learn to use the computer. The language used while communicating with other using the internet is still fairly new I would say. It only took less den a decade for the internet to have progressed to this stage and communication via this medium is still very much developing over the years. Over this time, linguists has already completed so much studies over the years.

The use of netlingo has progressed much over the years and almost everyone (especially the younger generation) using the internet would have used some form of netlingo. Some popular examples would include "gtg" - got to go, "brb" - be right back, "cu" - see you and many others! Even I use some of these abbreviations and certainly use emoticons like "=)" or "=(" in my daily online conversations with my friends online. The use of these netlingo is certainly very much part of the younger generation's online communication I would say.

The study on Gender and Identity interests me the most. It is certainly most surprising when we were shown that in the first study, the females actually would use more profanity as compared to the males but the second study showed otherwise. But it would be much more complete if the study were to be done with regards to the environment in which each party was brought up in and the company they had. For example, for myself, I was brought up in a mixed environment where I have both very refined relatives and very, i would say, "unrefined" ones.

Since young, I heard so much coarse language in a few dialects and of course could see the difference between who uses them more, and in this case, the males are definitely using it more. But this is due to the environment in which they were brought up in. The family was poor and had to work since young and probably this was only one of the many reasons in which the language use was much more "wide-spread" as compared to the standard language use. On the other hand, the more refined ones were educated and has more ability to support the education costs and thus, I see the use of more standard language from them. Therefore, I think it would be more helpful if the study would include factors like where the both parties were from, how their environment was like, etc. It would be interesting to see how these factors affect the way a person spoke over the internet.