Written by Suji Paek

Photo by Blake Hamilton
In an age when technology has inundated nearly every facet of modern culture, it has, in many ways, inadvertently helped regress our capacity to communicate.
Popularized by the current proto-language trend which accepts sentence fragments and partial thoughts as a passable form of dialect, the written language has degenerated to suit our insatiable appetites for bite-size chunks of information. As words become minced, punctuation gets dropped, and “Facebook me” has replaced the traditional cordiality of “Hello, my name is _____,” short form lingo has transcended from its purpose in media-related converse and into everyday discourse. The decline of fundamental communicable practices is upon us.
As the growing number of non-netizens adapt this means of pseudo communication, the future of intercultural dialogue—let alone across diverse cultures—is on the verge of resembling prehistoric grunting rather than articulated prose.
So what more is a modern journalist to do? Or more specifically, WWED: what would Ethos do?
For over ten weeks, Ethos staffers have worked tirelessly to fill the growing lacuna of well-packaged journalistic works, covering every facet of our stories through in-depth reporting, photography, illustration, design, and multimedia.
This is especially true in the case of Hector Lopez, a PSU student who was taken from his home and forced out of the country essentially overnight. Hector’s odyssey back to the US from Mexico is just one sampling of a much larger issue surrounding displacement, discrimination, and the definition of the “American identity.”
In an era when information is spewed out in truncated snatches, Ethos strives to present engaging, culturally diverse topics the best way we know how: as a complete journalistic work about a culture constantly in flux.