Why Your Parents Suck at Texting

Have you ever wondered why you parents are terrible at texting? Or why you seem to have different voices on social media versus email? In this video, Taha explores his typographical tone of voice on Twitter (spoiler: it's just a lot of commas).

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SOCIAL MEDIA
Sabrina
Melissa
Taha

CREDITS
Produced by Taha Khan
Video Editing by Sabrina Cruz
Motion Design by Sabrina Cruz
Sound Design by Sabrina Cruz

MUSIC

RECOMMENDED READING
Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

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Welcome to the joke under the fold!

What do you call a world renowned linguist? A figure of speech.

Leave a comment with the word SPEECH to let me know you were here ;-)

[loki-ktjy]

"the way i talk online isn't immature, its actually a highly advanced literary style" i am quoting this for my English class!

[kurre]

Just talked with my mate about how I texted my mom about getting a good grade in my first uni course and she replied "great."

[RachelShadoan]

My mom's first text was to my brother, and I guess she hadn't figured out how to put in spaces. So it was just

[JCBeast]

This is not Sabrina, this is "~ s a b r i n a~"
Does that make sense?

[aishaedris]

The way parents adapt to informal writing is so interesting my dad texts like he’s writing emails but my mom goes the other way on the formality scale and uses emojis for everything

[keegee]

Not sure if it’s just me... or do other people ... also have friends who are in their fourties... that always type with so many... ellipses...

[ssatva]

I also find it fascinating how texting conventions blur into SPEECH, such as finding myself saying 'lol' at times, and folks just roll with it.

[thegriffin]

Ok, so I know the thumbnail says “why parents text weird, ” but for a split second I thought it said “Why text? Parents weird.” And that’s honestly infinitely better in my eyes 😂

[EchoGillette]

Someone pointed out to me that younger people online tend to not use periods in general and now I'm HYPER AWARE of how unnecessarily often I used periods 😬

[CheenoTheRedstoner]

My Dad loves to Capitalize Random words In his Sentances and put a Space before his Question marks ?

[estherrosi-kessel]

another thing i think a lot of us do is type in all lowercase partially for the aesthetic but also partially so we can capitalize words for Emphasis

[krunkjunk]

So I'm awkward in person and now the online community I've been a part of for the past 23 years is just gonna decide my typing is awkward too. Fantastic.

[calamitywindpetal]

This is somewhat related to the video, but does anyone else find themselves mirroring other people's writing style? If I'm in a convo with a friend who says lol instead of haha, I'll find myself switching to lol. If I'm texting my mom, I use proper punctuation and grammar because she does. I just think it would be an interesting experiment to see how naturally people could fake each other's informal writing style after texting them for an hour or so, perhaps without knowing that they were going to be asked to fake the writing style so they wouldn't be trying to study it or anything. Great video!

[suchenzuehx]

sabrina kinda looks different idk if it’s just me

[HamzaSayedAli]

for some reason reading "how are sent shivers down my spine idk if its just a me thing but if felt like the person DEFINITELY does not actually want to talk about how you are lmaoooo pain

[simpli_A]

My granny got a smart phone for the first time fairly recently… she only had a wallphone before, and would regularly send us mail… and when she learned texting it was really cool seeing the transition… she would try to fit an entire conversation within one short text, everything was properly capitalized and punctuated, and best of all, she ended all her texts with “-love granny ❤“

[zinja]

Every time I click on a video on this channel I’m amazed at how this channel has evolved over the years. It’s beautiful to witness.

[calamitywindpetal]

I think the first one is the fake tweet, simply because its the only one where the I and I'm are capitalized. The rest of them have exclusively lower case letters.

[solusivebox]

I type out like 70-100 words in a text explaining something, only to get a ''ok'' reply from my mother.
Why do I even bother 🤧

[first]

The over use of commas is getting to me on a personal level