Studia grazie alle numerose risorse presenti su Docsity
Guadagna punti aiutando altri studenti oppure acquistali con un piano Premium
Prepara i tuoi esami
Studia grazie alle numerose risorse presenti su Docsity
Prepara i tuoi esami con i documenti condivisi da studenti come te su Docsity
Trova i documenti specifici per gli esami della tua università
Preparati con lezioni e prove svolte basate sui programmi universitari!
Rispondi a reali domande d’esame e scopri la tua preparazione
Riassumi i tuoi documenti, fagli domande, convertili in quiz e mappe concettuali
Studia con prove svolte, tesine e consigli utili
Togliti ogni dubbio leggendo le risposte alle domande fatte da altri studenti come te
Esplora i documenti più scaricati per gli argomenti di studio più popolari
Ottieni i punti per scaricare
Guadagna punti aiutando altri studenti oppure acquistali con un piano Premium
Riassunto dettagliato del libro di David Crystal, Language and the Internet (Capitoli Scelti: Chapters 2, 4, 7, 8)
Tipologia: Appunti
1 / 13
Questa pagina non è visibile nell’anteprima
Non perderti parti importanti!
The Internet is an electronic, global, and interactive medium, and each of these properties has consequences for the kind of language found there. The evolution of Netspeak illustrates a real tension which exists between the nature of the medium and the aims and expectations of its users.
But there are several major differences between Netspeak and face-to-face conversation. The first is a function of the technology – the lack of simultaneous feedback. e. There is no way that a recipient can react to our message while it is being typed, for the obvious reason that recipients do not know they are getting any messages at all until the text arrives on their screens. As a result, recipients are committed to experiencing a waiting period before the text appears. The time-delay (usually referred to as lag) is a central factor in many situations: there is an inherent uncertainty in knowing the length of the gap between the moment of posting a message and the moment of receiving a reaction. Even if a participant types a reply immediately, there may be a delay before that message reaches the other members’ screens, due to several factors, such as bandwidth processing problems, traffic density on the host computer, or some problem in the sender’s or receiver’s equipment. All lags cause problems, but some are much worse than others. The larger the number of participants involved in an interaction, the worse the situation becomes.12 Delays in a conversation between two people are annoying and ambiguous, But when an electronic interaction involves several people, such as in chatgroups, virtual worlds, and e-mails which are copied repeatedly, lag produces a very different situation, because it interferes with another core feature of traditional face-to-face interaction, the conversational turn. Turn-taking is so fundamental. The time-frames of the participants do not coincide. Lucy asks a question; Sue receives it and sends an answer, but on Ben’s screen the answer is received before the question. Or, Lucy sends a question, Sue replies, and Lucy sends another question; but on Ben’s screen the second question arrives before Sue’s reply to the first. Issues of feedback and turn-taking are ways in which Netspeak interaction differs from conversational speech. In virtual worlds, there are commands which allow people to express textually the emotion they feel, often with the addition of synthesized sounds and visual effects. Despite these innovations, Netspeak lacks the facial expressions, gestures, and conventions of body posture and distance which are so critical in expressing personal opinions and attitudes and in moderating social relationships. The limitation was noted early in the development of Netspeak, and led to the introduction of smileys or emoticons (they are typed in sequence on a single line, and placed after the final punctuation mark of a sentence. Almost all of them are read sideways. The two basic types express positive attitudes and negative attitudes respectively:
Netspeak is not by any means like conventional writing. A ‘page’ on the Web often varies from encounter to encounter for several possible reasons: its factual content might have been updated, its advertising sponsor might have changed, or its graphic designer might have added new features. The other Internet situations also display differences from traditional writing, with respect to their space-bound presence. E-mails are in principle static and permanent. Messages in asynchronic chatgroups tend to be long-term in character; but those in synchronic groups and in virtual worlds are not. Web pages often provide visual aids to support text, in the form of photographs, maps, diagrams, animations. Is Netspeak factually communicative (item 5 in Table 2.4)? For the Web and e-mails, the answer is a strong yes. Chatgroups the more academic and professional they are, the more likely they are to be factual in aim the more social and ludic chatgroups, on the other hand, routinely contain sequences which have negligible factual content. Finally, is Netspeak graphically rich? Once again, for the Web the answer is yes, its richness having increased along with technological progress. On the other hand, as typographers and graphic designers have repeatedly pointed out, just because a new visual language is available to everyone does not mean that everyone can use it well. The time it takes to download pages which contain ‘fancy graphics’ and multimedia elements is a routine cause of frustration. Netspeak is more than an aggregate of spoken and written features. As we shall see in later chapters, it does things that neither of these other mediums do, Baron calls it an ‘emerging language centaur – part speech, part writing.
−‘speech + writing + electronically mediated properties’.
The philosopher H. P. Grice is one, well known in pragmatics research for his four maxims of conversation: It is not so easy to work out what is going on in the Internet world. Part of the difficulty arises out of the anonymity inherent in the electronic medium. Operating behind a false persona seems to make people less inhibited. People seem to become particularly anxious if they do not know the sex and sexual preference of the person they are talking to. ‘The fact that it is so easy to lie and get away with it – as long as we can live with our own deceptions and the harm they may cause others – is a significant feature of the Internet. A spoof is any message whose origin is suspect; Spoof utterances may also be inserted by the software, and not by any of the participants. A similar problem arises with trolling , the sending of a message (a troll) specifically intended to cause irritation to others, such as the members of a chatgroup. At one extreme there is lurking – a refusal to communicate. Lurkers are people who access a chatgroup and read its messages but do not contribute to the discussion. Some manuals refer to lurking as ‘spying’. Spamming refers to the sending of usually unwanted messages of excessive size. Flaming differs from spamming, in that messages (flames) are always aggressive, related to a specific topic, and directed at an individual recipient (spamming, by contrast, is often ludic or emotionally neutral, unspecific in content. Web page designers constantly talk about the importance of ‘clear navigation’ around a page, between pages in a site, and between sites, with the aim of providing unproblematic access to sites, clear screen layouts, and smoothly functioning selection options. The social function of much Internet communication has been a major theme of the literature in recent years, especially with reference to the concept of a ‘virtual community’. The Internet is not as global a medium as it might at first appear to be. Most Internet interactions are not global in character; we are not talking to millions when we construct our
unnecessary. The farewell has come to indicate that no further personalized text is following. Secondly, the farewell has an extended identity function, Obviously it identifies the sender to the immediate recipient, but it also makes this fuller identification available to others who may eventually see the message, in the case of forwarded or attached mail. As e-mail becomes a routine part of social life, at all levels, it will inevitably be influenced by the linguistic mores of its users. Already many people use it as a more immediate and practical way of sending formal letters and greetings cards.
The clarity of the message on the screen is a dominant theme of e-mail manuals. Clarity in this context involves both legibility and intelligibility. Misspellings, for example, are a natural feature of the body message in an e-mail. They occur, regardless of the educational background of the writer, in any situation where there is fast typing and a lack of editorial revision. For the most part, these errors cause little or no disruption to the communicative process. Nor is the reader going to make a social judgement about the writer’s educational ability, on the basis of such data – a contrast with what would happen if someone wrote a traditional letter containing such errors. More important, in relation to intelligibility, is the question of a message’s coherence, arising out of the inherently dialogic character of e-messaging. Although some e-mails are sent without any expectation of a response, the vast majority do expect a reply – and get one. Accordingly, the communicative unit, as in everyday conversation, is the exchange. The chief linguistic evidence for exchanges is the frequency. One difference between personalized and institutionalized messages is that the former use three times as many single-line paragraphs; this seems to reflect the need for length to enable institutions to make their various expository (informational, marketing, etc.) points. In personalized e-mails, the one-liners tend to be a brief acknowledgement. The longer a sender’s paragraphs, the more likely the recipient is to respond in this way. The result has been described as framing. Framing is a consequence of the ease with which people can cut and paste from an original message. It is also a feature of chatgroup interactions (p. 141), where an extended discussion may make use of extensive quotation from several participants, providing the context for a reaction. Framing has both strengths and weaknesses. It is a convenience, in that a series of points can be responded to rapidly and succinctly, either in the order in which they were made or in some fresh order. Time and memory are saved, as it is no longer necessary to trawl back through an e-mail thread to find the original remarks. On the other hand, everybody knows the difficulties which arise when quotations are being used extensively: meaning can change dramatically when words are quoted out of context, whether innocently or deliberately. Features such as screen structure, message openings and closing, message length, dialogic strategies, and framing are central to the identification of e-mail as a linguistic variety.
There has been a tendency to highlight the informal features of messages – such as the use of contractions, loose sentence construction, subject ellipsis (Will let you know), colloquial abbreviations (bye, cos, v slow, s/thing), and ‘cool’ acronyms (LOL, CU, p. 85) – but these are plainly not indicative of the variety as a whole, as many messages do not use them. Rhetorical questions also seem to be commoner in e-mails than in other varieties of written English, apart from certain types of literary expression. Advertising e-mails are full of them, reflecting a style that is more likely to be heard in commercial broadcasting than in graphic advertising. There is also a reduced use of capitalization, which may involve either grammar. Smileys (p. 36) are available for use, though they are by no means as frequent as the explanatory literature suggests. Common enough in the exchanges between teenagers. Colour is also present, being routinely used to highlight hypertext links (www or @ addresses). The range of typographical options is bound to grow, as technology progresses. But at present, there are few graphic or graphological features that are universally present.
E-mail It is better than the telephone in eliminating what has been called ‘telephone tag’ (in which people repeatedly leave messages with each other to ‘call me back’). E-mail is better than the letter in obtaining a quick response to an enquiry; but not for every kind of message. it has been noted that people have a greater tendency to self-disclose on the computer, compared with telephone and face-to-face conversation. The limitations of e-mail, as a communicative medium, are in fact still being discovered. There is no way of controlling an e-mail, once it has been sent there any way of knowing who will eventually see it or edit it. There have been complaints about e-bullying (e.g. in e- mail staff reprimands), sexism, sexual harassment, the use of libellous language, and rudeness. Because of its spontaneity, speed, privacy, and leisure value, e-mail offers the option of greater levels of informality than are found elsewhere in traditional writing. E-mail has extended the language’s stylistic range in interesting and motivating ways. In my view, it is an opportunity, not a threat, for language education.
Most Web text will inevitably be printed, given the technology generally in use. Typewritten text (in the sense of text produced by a typewriter) is hardly relevant, belonging as it does to a pre-electronic age, though of course it can be simulated, and many of the features of typing style have had an influence on the word-processing age. Handwritten text has only a limited presence, being available only through the use of specially designed packages, and is of little practical value to most Internet users. On the Web, many pages have areas allocated to particular kinds of information and designed to attract the attention and disturb any process of predictable reading through the screen in a conventional way. But there are yet other kinds of graphic organization. The
download a document to our own computer, change the text, then upload the new document to a Web site we have created for the purpose. In this way, it is relatively easy for people to steal the work of others, or to adapt that work in unsuspected ways. if more than one author is involved, they have been authorized by a single person, such as a script editor or a committee secretary. But on the Web, these checks and balances are often not present. There are multi-authored pages, where the style shifts unexpectedly from one part of a page to another. The linguistic character of a site thus becomes increasingly eclectic. People have more power to influence the language of the Web than in any other medium, because they operate on both sides of the communication divide, reception and production. They not only read a text, they can add to it. The distinction between creator and receiver thus becomes blurred. The linguistic limitations of word-processing and search-engine software affect our ability to find what is on the Web in several ways, and eventually must surely influence our intuitions about the nature of our language. So do the attempts to control usage in areas other than the politically correct. Which writers have not felt angry at the way pedants in the software companies have attempted to interfere with their style, sending a warning when their sentences go beyond a certain length, or when they use which instead of that (or vice versa), or -ise instead of -ize (or vice versa). It is good to see some artists coming on board. Turner prize nominee Tomoko Takahashi has a Web project he devised to object to the way software is imposing a ‘standardised corporate language on to our writing’ while ‘subtly altering its meaning’. He calls it Word Perhect. Software designers underestimate the amount of variation there is in the orthographic system, the pervasive nature of language change, and the influence context has in deciding whether an orthographic feature is obligatory or optional.
The Web is an eclectic medium, and this is seen also in its multilinguistic inclusiveness. Not only does it offer a home to all linguistic styles within a language; it offers a home to all languages – once their communities have a functioning computer technology. This has been the most notable change since the Web began. It was originally a totally English medium – as was the Internet as a whole, given its US origins.33 But with the Internet’s globalization, the presence of other languages has steadily risen. In the mid-1990s, a widely quoted figure was that just over 80% of the Net was in English. The Web is increasingly reflecting the distribution of language presence in the real world, and there is a steadily growing set of sites which provide the evidence.43 They range from individual businesses doing their best to present a multilingual identity to major sites collecting data on many languages.
The future is also very much dependent on the levels of English-speaking ability in individual countries, and the likelihood of further growth in those levels.50 Code-mixing is also found in many interactive Internet situations, though not so much as yet on the Web. A great deal has to be done before this day dawns. There needs to be immense progress in Internet linguistics, especially in semantics and pragmatics, and also in graphology and typography. There is an enormous gap to be filled in comparative lexicography: most of the English technical terms used on the Web have still not been translated into other languages, and a great deal of varying usage exists, with English loanwords and local variants uncertainly coexisting.
The various established media elements are already becoming increasingly integrated, in a frame of reference neatly captured by the phrase streaming media. It would appear that the aim is to make anything speedily available with anything – Web with sound and video, personal digital assistants with Web access, television with Internet access, Internet with television access, radio programmes with pictures, and so on. From a linguistic point of view, the developments are of two broad kinds: those which will affect the nature of language use within an individual speech community; and those which bring different languages together. The more integration there is, the more it will need to be managed. The following example illustrates how a new technology has immediate linguistic consequences. During the 1990s, the mobile phone industry developed its short message service (SMS), often referred to as texting. It is a cheaper medium than conventional voice calling, and a more private medium, in that users can communicate without their conversation aurally disturbing other people they happen to be with. A Mori/Lycos UK survey At the same time, reports suggest that the service is being used for other purposes, such as sexual harassment, school bullying, political rumour-mongering, and interaction between drug dealers and clients. Doubtless, as the technology develops, a whole new domain of restricted language will emerge, as people adapt their messages to fit the screen, and make use of new software options.
Language pathologists, literacy specialists, mother-tongue teachers, and others have begun to sense the possibilities of the Internet as a medium for motivating their populations (patients, reluctant readers, etc.), and as a way of facilitating some of their clinical, remedial, or educational tasks, at least with reference to reading and writing.9 But it is in relation to foreign-language pedagogy the Internet... will eventually transform the way that the teaching and learning of English, and the business of ELT is conducted’. Each of the five Netspeak situations reviewed in this book has relevance. E-mail, to begin with, is a convenient medium which gives students the experience of authentic writing tasks, in relation to fellow-students, teachers, and native-speaker contacts.12 It is now widely incorporated into language teaching – in those parts of the world where Internet access is routine – for a broad range of purposes, such as ‘domestic’ exchanges on everyday topics,
