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Internet Language


 * __Table of contents__**
 * Introduction
 * History
 * The birth of internet
 * The use of internet as a social interactive engine
 * The online videogames
 * Addiction to videogames
 * Minimum effort law
 * Sentence structure modification
 * Word shortening
 * Emoticons
 * History of emoticons
 * Famous emoticons
 * MeMes
 * Definition of MeMes
 * Origin of MeMes
 * Examples of MeMes


 * Conclusion
 * Webgraphy

Introduction
Why did we choose this topic for the wiki project? Firstly we thought on a science topic, because all we are in the scientific branch, but we soon realised that we could find a more interesting topic which we could enjoy working on. Then the idea of memes and internet language came up and we believed that that topic could be perfectly developed in English. We finally focused the work on the internet language and online communications because of the fact that we live in an era where the internet is so much present in our daily life, and we wanted and had the desire of writing and gathering information about how's the internet language today. What does this project consist on? In this project we have gathered information about internet and its language in order to explain by a general way how the communication of the internet goes, since the use of abbreviations until the memes. We wanted to reflect on it how has the internet changed since it was created until now, the evolution of the communication through the net and the reasons for all those things. We have spent space specially on memes, we thought that it was a needed point of humour for our work.



The birth of internet
Internet, like every important invention, has a military past. Since the conflict between humans appeared, the war has been a period where scientific research becomes really important. Every innovation that one of the sides got supposed a little advantage against the other side of the war. It was important to keep the innovation in secret and for military uses only during the war. After the war ended, the innovation was released to public use, to finance the costs that the investigation had. In the case of internet, the conflict occurred during the cold war, when the USSR launched the first human-made object to orbit the earth: the Sputnik artificial satellite. The United States of America, in front of that exhibition of scientific advancement, created the Advanced Research Projects Agency. In 1969, ARPA created the first network, known as ARPANet. It consisted in the communication between the military databases of four universities. One of the most successful services created in Internet has been the World Wide Web (1990). It consists on a group of protocols which allow the remote consult of hypertext hosted on a server, through the internet. It has been so successful that sometimes internet is confused with this service.

The use of internet as a social interactive engine
Since the birth of the internet, the way of comunicating has progressed with huge steps. Today, the internet is used for many things; Since the search of information until the purchase of items. But one of the greatests advances that the internet has experienced is related to the comunication between people. Today, there are lot's of ways to communicate with other peoply by using the internet. The most used ones are the programs like msn messenger, the mails, and the social networks, that are the most used ones of the last years. Social networks are webs where people creates a profile and comunicates with firends of the real life that have an account too. The social newtworks have been a revolution of the communication, and since the first appearance of a social network in the web facebook) lots of others webs have been created, like twitter and tuenti. But, does the internet work as a social interactive engine? the answer is yes, it works, but using the internet is always dangerous. If you want to use the internet well, you have to do it by a safe way, and that's hard. Before signing any contract you have to read the therms and conditions that a web has got, and once you get into the web, you have to use correctly the tools that the social networks gives to you, increasing the privacity of your profile by not letting uknown people to see your private information. And do never forget to keep in contact with people in real life. It's not an usual thing to find people that are addict to the social newtworks and that doesn't have communication in real life, but it's important to have contact with people. And remember, the better thing is to control the use of those great but maybe dangerous tools that the social networks are.

The online videogames
Video games are a millionaire business. It’s the most lucrative entertainment business in the world. Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, the first video games company, in 1972. Alan Alcorn was the Atari's first engineer. Pong was the first video game of Atari. Pong was a game that consisted of two paddles which were used to bounce a ball in order to avoid the ball going out of the screen. Nolan and Alan put the machine in a local tavern to check the opinion of the people. They put Pong into a box; next to this box they put another box to put the money. Soon they realised that the machine had become very famous between the people, this is how the video games business started. There are people who think that Nolan Bushnell copied the prototype of Pong from another inventor, Ralph Baer. Ralph Baer was the designer of Odyssey, the computer game that originated the idea of Pong. In 1977 Space Invaders of the Japanese company Taito went on sale. Space Invaders had a great success. This game started the golden age of the video games. Nollen sold part of the shares of Atari. Some of the workers were unhappy with the salary, so most of them decided to leave the company. One of them, David Crane, found a new company, Activision. Pitfall was the first successful game by this newbie company. In 1980, the thirteen-years-old Oliver brothers began to create video games for the PC. When they were 18 years old, they joined with the Durling brothers. These people founded together a video game company. They were the pioneers of the video game industry in the UK. The video game revolution came with the Japanese company Nintendo. Nintendo, due to the ideas of Shigeru Miyamoto released games as Donkey Ko, Mario and Zelda. All these guys were the pioneers of the video games history. A video game is software created for entertainment. It is based on the interaction between one or more persons with an electronic display. An electronic device runs the game. This electronic device can be a computer, a machine arcade or a mobile phone. These entire electronics device are called "platform". In the video games world there are several genres of games. The most common game genres are: adventure, shooting, educational, strategy and fighting. The multiplayer mode has several models. One of its models is the online form through a global network (Internet). The online mode of video games was created to play with or against real users. On the one hand, this game mode means, for many people, a form to increase the sociability. On the other hand there are others who think that addiction to videogames has increased with this game mode. The video games provide distractions, diversion, they often provide you information and usually they make you learn some things. Normally, the use of the video games hadn't to be negative. It is for educators and the family to control their use and limit the addictions and excesses.

Addiction to videogames
The industry of the videogames has progressed a lot since its creation. We can see that if we look the people that play videogames and the quality of them, that is increasing constantly and it seems that it has no stop. Probably this success of the videogames industry is due to the high fun that playing videogames produces. But not all of the videogames are good things; some videogames create an addiction that is so difficult to avoid, and that can be so bad. First of all, we'll have to make a list about which videogames are the ones that create the higher addiction: In the world of the videogames there are a lot of different styles of them. But the ones that create addiction are MMORPG and shooters played on-line. The online videogames have a huge range of options that its gameplay offers, and that, maybe infinite, range of possibilities makes them be so addictive. Why? In online videogames, anything that you do isn’t enough for being the best one; there'll be always someone better than you. Maybe this kind of competition for being the best on the game is the beginning of the addiction to a certain videogame. Lots of competitions are made in online videogames, as if they were a sport, and the best players of the world are sometimes recorded and show their videos online. This usually happens in MMORPGS and shooters like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty respectively, where there are high gaming competitions and rankings. Apart from that, videogames (in this case the MMORPGS are more intense) create a virtual life, apart from the real life of the player. That can make the player avoid the real life that he/she has got, that make relationships (for example) disappear, provokes a left of the studies (if the player is a student) with a consequent academic failure, etc. There's a text that I found in a web that talked about addiction that shows what the addiction to videogames does. //The player of WoW will turn into a magic adventure with his night elf rogue, and will have to level up it till he gets lvl 85. After levelling up his char, the player will teleport in the future for 2 years, and will know nothing about what happened to his known friends and, of course, his girlfriend, that supposedly left him a year// //ago, but he doesn't remember that. Now he has got a new life (worst, of course) and a night elf into a pc scree////n that probably will not give him happiness."// The conclusion of all is that the videogames addiction is **of course** an illness, and sadly, it's an illness that more and more people are starting to have.

Sentence structure modification
The internet has created a new written language with the pass of the time, where the minimum effort is the main character. But, ¿Why we always try to do the less we can in the quickliest time? A part from a nature characteristic that makes us tend to spend the less energy we can, we want to do the less we can due to the way of comunicating. If we're comunicating face to face, the message we want to give is sent and understood in the instant, but with the internet we have to, first of all, write the text, and then send it. What relation does that have with the minimum effort law? Well, the desire of expressing our message by a quickly way has made us to make a kind of modifications, like the sentence structure modification. So, how does the sentence structure modification works? Well, that way of expressing ourselfs by a quckly way consist in making a phrase the sorter we can. For example: -Do you want to go with me to that raid which is in the enchanted mountain? is turned into -go to raid in em? or a -wanna raid em? So, sentence structure modification consists on making a phrase the short as possible.

Word shortening
Why do we shorten words? The shortened words are abbrevations. We could say that shortening words is a response to the of the minimun effort law. The principal objective is to write faster for a quicklier communication, as in the sentence structure modification. Finally we have to say that video games have got an important weight in the world of word shortening due to the necessity of writing so fast ingame if needed, and that's why we can extract a lot of vocabulary from videogames that we have included too in the examples of word shortening.

Examples of word shortening

**History of emoticons**
An emoticon is a combination of symbols (punctuation and letters) which represents a facial expression and is frequently used in the internet applications such as videogames, forums, chat... The facial expression contains the writer’s current mood; this can be happiness, sadness, hungriness, surprise, fear... The emoticon is written on the computer only using a keyboard, there is no need of drawing anything. We found its origin in the beginning of the internet communication between people, when there were no ways to express the mood that the writer had when he was writing something to another person. Then confusions occurred, people thought that their interlocutor was angry when he was just joking, and they realised that they need a way to express the intention of their message. As a response to that request, computer specialist proposed :-) to remark that something which has been said was a joke and :-( to remark that the person was talking seriously. Since that one appeared, many others were created to express other feelings like anger :@, shyness :$, or indifference :|. Afterwards, emoticons using other symbols were created, they expressed more concrete feelings. Like the annoyed or rhetorical answer ¬¬, the charming face :3 or the extreme happiness ^.^. In forums or videogames, usually the emoticon symbol combination became automatically replaced with a picture of a face with that feeling. In order to create more pictures with feelings a new way to codify them was created; it consisted in a word or a number between brackets. In example, the devil (6), the guy with sunglasses (h) or the action emoticons (action) like dance (dance). Furthermore, complex emoticons appeared, they were an evolved form of the simplest ones and they used much more symbols. They expressed more intense feelings, such as (>_>) (¬_¬) (^-^) (-_-) (^o^) (^3^).

Famous and most used emoticons
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**Definition of MeMes**
A meme is a picture or a drawing, normally a face, that represents a reaction to a situation that may be funny or shocking. The memes usually go in a vignette about the real life, and the meme is the reaction of the people in this situation. The meme denotation comes from the original definition of meme, which is any theoretical unit of cultural information transmitted from one subject to another one. But the original meaning is not the exact meaning that we are looking for, we prefer our personal and more subjective definition for these memes. The meme almost always shows a person with a exaggerated emotion, with can be complemented with some words (FUUUUUUUUUU, POKER FACE, Okay...) and, as it has been mentioned above, memes seldom go alone, they are usually in a vignette which puts them in a context and gives them full significate. The vignette usually has the action-reaction structure: a concrete situation is shown and something on it makes a reaction on one of some of its characters, which is shown with memes.

Origin of MeMes
Memes first appeared in forums, where people share funny things like: videos,  images, news..., such as 4chan  , one  of the most popular forums. The cartoons are often very simple, since they are drawn with the paint or some very simple drawing program. These cartoons became so famous because they express problems or funny situations from the life of normal people, and people can identify with them. The first meme was " Rage guy ", and it's still one of the most famous.

Examples of MeMes
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Conclusion
After finishing the project, we can conclude that internet has advanced through the ages from a military usage to a social tool. It is now a common use engine that we use almost every day, which couldn’t have been believed fifteen years ago. As a consequence of its daily usage, the internet language has evolved following the minimum effort law, so the words and the sentences are written in a shorter and easier way in order to write faster. However, not all the internet evolution consists on destructing things, Internet has provided a way to create based on the collaboration of the people. As a result of this, emoticons, gifts, memes… and an endless list of creations have appeared on the net. Those new creations are a new form of communicating between internet surfers.