I JUST read an article about the 15 scariest movies about computers. I don’t watch a lot of movies, and I did not get to see 12 of those mentioned. But here are the three that I did see, and if you can find them, these three are in my list of classics:
Of course, there are also lots of tech movies that are not scary. One of them was the classic, “You’ve got Mail.” It was done in 1998, and starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. We sponsored a premiere showing of it, and it was one of those movies that heralded the use of email and showed how this new technology helped create a romance between two people. Of course, this theme has been played many times for the next 15 years and email become the dominant way to communicate. But email, it seems, is waning, and the new generation is finding chat and social networks as a new way to communicate now. Most school children don’t check their emails as much as they used to. My sons communicate mainly through Twitter and Facebook.
Speaking of them, Twitter and Facebook have been always mentioned in tandem as the poster children of social networking, but both have not developed equally. As Facebook is now at 1.5 billion users, Twitter has seen their users almost plateau at 300 million. I have a Twitter account, and many friends do, too but I do see that they are not as active on it as on Facebook, though my son uses that to interact with his friends due to its direct messaging feature. Twitter’s stock has been on decline, and recently, they announced something that will hopefully get more people interested. One of the strengths of Twitter (and probably its weakness) is its limit of 140 characters per message. They have just announced that if you use it for direct messaging, they will raise the character limit to 10,000 characters. Also, they now make it easier for people to privately send messages to groups instead of just individuals. You may want to note that Facebook’s Messenger has a limit of 20,000 characters.
Anyway, when you are chatting or group messaging, you may want to note that in a survey, Facebook has ruled that LOL is dead. LOL (laughing out loud) used to be a favorite acronym on many texts and chats. In fact, there was time when we make jokes on the dinner table, and instead of laughing, my sons would just say, “LOL”. In its survey, Facebook says, 51 percent would say “HAHA”, and 33 percent would just use smiling emojis or emoticons. Thirteen percent would say “Hehe”, and only less than two percent now use “LOL”.
(wilson@ngkhai.com)