E-COMMERCE LEXICON: COMMUNICATING IN BRIEF
Conference paper for the Style Council Conference, Brisbane, November 2002.
Joanne Jacobs
Brisbane Graduate School of Business
Queensland University of Technology
The development of an e-commerce lexicon has been posited as a revolution in style.
In a business environment where time is money, information is power and
transactions are risky, there has developed a lexicon which is characterised by
efficiency of language, abbreviation, and even an entirely new literacy among the
technological elite.
There are some who argue that the internet is no different from any other
communication space. The academic, Michael Porter, has said that “for all its power,
the internet does not represent a break from the past; rather, it is the latest stage in the
ongoing evolution of information technology” (2001: 74). But while business
transactions per se may not have changed, the manner of communicating those
transactions has changed dramatically, and continues to change at an extraordinary
pace.
If there is a genuine e-commerce lexicon, then it has grown from a revolution in
business, both for vendors and consumers alike. There have been changes to
consumer expectations on the basis of internet enabled technologies. Time pressures,
user empowerment and mass customisation made possible through the unique features
of the internet – time and geographical independence, database integration and user
profiling - has meant that all parties in e-commerce transactions have an expectation
of getting and making more for less investment in financial terms as well as time and
other investments.
This change has also taken place within the framework of technologies that, for all
their advancement, still limit the format of communication. Cook (2002) has noted
that “if human behaviour were computer programs, human language would be the
killer app”. Making oneself understood in an e-commerce transaction requires use of
a digital language in a manner that is not adequately addressed by either written or
verbal precedents. Anthropologists and linguists have already noted that the style of
e-communication adopted in a digital space is one which carries traces of spokenness
and writtenness but which goes beyond that nexis of verbal and digital
communications and virtually invents itself as we engage with the technologies. Of
course, this not only makes the creation of a style manual for e-commerce
communications difficult, it also makes those of us experimenting in these
technologies look a little amateurish. Richards (1998) has said that “our technological
capability has outpaced our social capability. This makes us look like social
incompetents in charge of increasingly under-utilised knowledge”. But it is this
process of defining knowledge which is central to this process.
Given that mass adoption of the internet has occurred at the time of commercial
occupation of the internet, it pays to look briefly at the forces operating on the
development of this manner of communication. To do that, it’s useful to consider
how knowledge and information are regarded in light of digital technologies. We are
often told we are living in an information age. Commentators from Nicholas
Negroponte and Howard Rheingold through to Robert McChesney and Neil Postman
have all argued over the rise of information as a currency in and of itself. But the
discipline of economics distinguishes between information and knowledge very
deliberately. Information, it is argued is a flow concept – mere data in a system, and
the internet is a receptacle for an extraordinary level of information, to the point of
information overload. As a result, the value of information is reduced. Knowledge,
economic argues, is a stock concept –something that is value added and can be stored
and used on a regular basis but which shouldn’t be regarded as something you
archive. Rather, it is constantly in the system, being updated and augmented through
communication exchanges. Knowledge is drawn from information, but only after
information has been value-added – made appropriate for a particular exchange.
This economics-oriented theory has driven technologists to creation of information
extraction programs in order to turn mere information into value-added knowledge.
Kushmerick (2000) has described IE as “the task of identifying the specific fragments
of a single document that constitute its core semantic content”. In an effort to make
exchanges more efficient, this reduction of documentation from its verbose and
complete form, into the key elements needed for the exchange to take place has
influenced the nature and form of digital communication.
The result of this reduction of language is the development of a simplistic and
somewhat naïve sense of getting more for less, and having more time and capacity for
further exchanges.
Of course the problem with this kind of abbreviated
communication is that it inevitably produces a less sophisticated lexicon for
communication, and encourages individuals in a communication exchange to produce
messages and writing and send those messages without reflection in the manner of a
written communication, and without the social and non-verbal cues we have in faceto-face or voice communications. This in itself is problematic because meaning can
be so easily misinterpreted.
In order to overcome the problems with misinterpretation chat communities and email
exchanges adopted the iconic language of emoticons to indicate emotional responses
to communication exchanges. While these emoticons were initially regarded as a
feature of informal, chat-oriented communications, business exchanges have adopted
emoticons in business-to-business transactions at least. As Levine et al (2000) have
noted in their basic text for the future of business, the Cluetrain Manifesto, the end of
business as usual is a product of the end of formal business transactions, and the rise
of business conversations mediated by networked technologies. And these informal
conversations need all the visual cues of chat as a basis for ensuring client and
consumer comfort with e-commerce transactions.
Bruce (1997) in his analysis of literacy technologies has argued that virtual reality is
indeed the most advanced form of literacy in that it combines so many extant styles of
formatting content. As linguists and style manual creators, you may wel argue with
that point but the fact remains that the e-commerce lexicon has grown from an
advanced e-communication system and series of protocols. It is not as chaotic as
many commentators would have you believe. Indeed, it is probably one of the most
complex systems of framing communication yet invented. Crystal (2002) in his
research on Language and the Internet has noted that email is a particularly unusual
communication in that receivers can excerpt segments of the sender’s message and
choose to respond very particularly to information they have extracted as requiring a
response. The very practice of selective responses, snipping text and contextualising
communication is something never before experienced in human communication. But
the same framing of information is not so possible with alternative means of digital
communication and ultimately, email is not the only form of e-commerce
communication, and is thus not the only lexicon.
This leads us onto considering the range of lexicons in existence.

Business – generally operating with email, some chat and direct document
transfer. Tends to be the most formal of lexicons but also the most efficient
for closing a deal
 Chat, etc – primarily the product of social cybercommunities but increasingly
being used to discuss business matters even among socially oriented groups.
 Blog – the newest of forums for communication, and the most recently
accepted phenomenon in the e-commerce lexicon (as a result of journalist,
William Safire’s use of the word in an article in the New York Times).
Each of these forums have varying protocols, but they all contribute to the overall
elements of the e-commerce lexicon because each is being employed for e-commerce
transactions and exchanges.
The phenomenon of blogging in and of itself is one of the most advanced forms of
consumer-consumer marketing in existence. While it is primarily the activity of
people who are driven to share their experiences with strangers, the nature of the
communities is that you have to be invited by a friend to participate, or else pay to get
in. Thus it is a self-selecting community who probably already bring their own
lexicon to communication exchanges.
It is imperative at this point that I at least mention LEET SPEAK. Adopted widely by
the technological elite, this language was initially thought to have evolved when the
internet was adopted by technologically inferior beings who did not understand
programming languages. But it has evolved over time and leet speak generators now
exist on the WWW as a means of assisting the uninitiated in understanding the
concepts being discussed by these digital nomads. In terms of its implications for an
e-commerce lexicon, the novelty value of leet speak may seem arbitrary and selective,
but the adoption of expressions central to the digital elite and propagated through leet
speak could well influence an e-commerce lexicon over time. The repetition of ALL
YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US (a poor translation to English of a statement in
a Japanese game widely used by leet speakers) among the digerati has already placed
the phrase in the annals of leet history. It is even beginning to seep into popular
parlance among the technologically adept sectors of the e-commerce community.
These mass trends in digital communication need to be watched carefully for their
influence over an e-commerce lexicon at large.
The nature of an e-commerce lexicon is that it is constantly evolving. For linguists
and style manual editors, this poses the problem of setting standards that will
inevitably fall out of date in a very short period. However, there are possibilities that
can emerge from such a problem. As the lexicon evolves, the technology itself can be
used to dictate style. For e-commerce transactions, the drive for efficiency of
communication techniques will eventually be stalled by the recognition that
relationship management and emotional and communicative systems are desirable
entities in an exchange, and that there is stock value in support systems and pseudobusiness conversations. As terminology shifts and the lexicon broadens, electronic
media will not replace print media, but will become a reference resource for
discussing publications, and making sense of traditional print.
References
Bruce, B. C. (1997) ‘Literacy technologies: What stance should we take?’, Journal of
Literacy Research, 29 (2) pp 289-309
Cook, F. (2002) ‘Linguists see ‘Digital Language’ as Cultural Catalyst’,
ExpertEditor.com, http://www.experteditor.com/netlingo.htm
Crystal, D. (2002) Language and the Internet, London: Cambridge University Press
Kushmerick, N. (2000) ‘Gleaning the Web’, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April
1999, pp 20-22
Levine, R., Locke, C., Searles, D., Weinberger, D. (2000) The Cluetrain Manifesto:
The end of business as usual, Cambridge Massachussetts: Perseus Books
Porter, M. (2001) ‘Strategy and the Internet’, Harvard Business Review, March.
Richards, I. (1998) ‘Innovation: the strategic imperative’, The Knowledge
Management Report Series, Lavendon: Management Trends International