Language & Technology
Introduction
This guide is written for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and
A2) syllabuses in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to
language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a
general interest in language science.
What do the examiners say about this subject?
Language and technology is one of the subjects studied within the broader area of
Language and Social Contexts, which is set as a module for study within the
specification for the AQA's Advanced Level (GCE AS and A2) Specification B for
English Language. If you are a student taking this course, or a teacher giving support
to such students, you may find the examiners' guidance helpful. But it may also be
useful to anyone who wishes to understand how language relates to modern
communication technologies.
In giving guidance to people studying the subject, the examiners advise them to study:
the variety of language forms insofar as they are affected by
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the technological medium used for communication (e.g. telephone, radio,
television, computer);
the social functions that such media perform in both interpersonal and mass
communication;
historical and contemporary changes, where appropriate.
In particular, the guidance says, candidates should examine
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everyday functions and activities in context
discourse features.
In their support materials the examiners add this:
"For the purposes of [their assessment module] Language and Technology means
language and communication technology… The focus is on how information and
communication technology augments, constrains and simulates human-to-human
communication…"
The examiners suggest that candidates should consider:
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advantages, sometimes called affordances or potential capabilities, enabled by
such technology;
constraints, as in entering text on a phone or keyboard;
how technologies such as text chat and answer phone messages show features
of interaction more commonly associated with spoken conversation.
The examiners note that academic research into this area of language use is still in its
early stages, and that what is published may not be reliable. But at the same time,
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there is very wide use of the technologies of communication. For this reason,
investigations of text messages and instant messenger conversations, carried out by
students (perhaps for another assessment module) are as likely to be reliable as
published books. There are more resources available for the study of (spoken)
telephone conversations, radio phone-ins and sports commentaries - transcripts of
which have appeared as data in examination papers on the current specification and
the similar syllabus that preceded it.
The examiners advise teachers to use varied types of text in presenting the subject.
These might, for example, include:
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transcripts and written records of actuality;
accounts of popular attitudes in print media;
examples of represented text (such as invented e-mail messages in fiction and
advertising), and
excerpts from any investigations, including those done by students.
The examiners provide some examples of questions, including texts of these types,
with an expert commentary, and a preceding caution: that they are not to be taken as
model questions. On the other hand, the commentary is a good indication of what an
informed response would ideally include. A second caution stresses the need for
balanced answers - general comment needs to be related to specific details in the
texts, while attention to these specific details needs to be illuminated by reference to
theory and general ideas about language that they exemplify or challenge.
What is technology?
"The medium is the message". Marshall McLuhan
It's not necessary to start here, but in order to understand the connection of language
and technology it may be helpful to arrive at a working description of what
technology is. Here are some dictionary entries for technology:
1. Theoretical knowledge of industry and the industrial arts.
2. The application of science to the arts.
Funk and Wagnall's New Practical Standard Dictionary, New York, 1946
Science of the industrial arts; practical arts collectively.
Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Oxford, 1969
The methods for using scientific discoveries for practical purposes, esp. in industry
Cambridge Dictionary of American English, Cambridge, 2002
Knowledge, equipment, and methods that are used in science and industry.
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, 2002
New machines, equipment and ways of doing things that are based on modern
knowledge of about science and computers.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Harlow, 2003
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1. The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
2. The branch of knowledge concerned with applied sciences.
Compact Oxford Dictionary Online, Oxford, 2004
These entries cover just over fifty years, and reveal a gradual change in meaning. The
idea of arts drops out, while science is amplified to include science and computers.
The Longman entry reflects the influence, perhaps, of the more specialized
information technology. In this way, since the noun describes technology in practical
use, its meaning now covers new or emerging kinds of technology. As a noun,
therefore, technology does not denote a single, unchanging and specific thing. It
denotes, rather, a very general category of things - which includes a very wide range
of other things, some of which change over time.
What remains constant is the idea that technology applies knowledge to achieve
practical purposes. As regards language, while all technology has a connection to
language use, this connection is arguably more explicit or obvious in the case of
information technology. Here are two recent example dictionary entries for
information technology:
The study or use of electronic processes for gathering and storing information and
making it available using computers.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Harlow, 2003
The use of computers and other electronic equipment to store and send information
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, 2002
What does it have to do with language?
All technology influences language, in ways that are not always obvious. The
development of transport systems, for example, leads people to move around so that
language forms used in regional varieties may move into other regions. We use a
metaphor such as "all guns blazing" to suggest the idea of an action performed with
energy or aggression - so the technology of weapons extends the usage of everyday
speech or writing.
Since technology is a means to extend man's reach, then it is necessarily connected to
language, in the sense that both natural languages and technologies will be important
in enabling us to do all sorts of things in almost any area of human activity. For
example, we use aeroplanes to fly people and goods around the world. And we try to
make this safer and more efficient by developing an air-traffic control system. That's
language and technology working together for the common good. (And English is the
language used in that system globally.)
This uses one kind of technology (radio communication) to support use of language in
conversations in an adapted form of international English, that pass on information
derived from other technologies (radar, weather-forecasting systems), to the users of
yet another set of technologies (the pilots of aircraft).
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This may help us to distinguish between the technology in itself, and the things we do
with it, from a linguistic perspective. In terms of modelling our ideas about
technology and language, we may think
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first of the different technologies (printing, telephony, radio and TV, e-mail
and so on)
and only then about what we do with them.
Alternatively, we may think first of the kind of language interactions we make, and
then of the technologies that enable this. In this kind of model, we might usefully
think of
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levels of openness and privacy - is the language used in a public or restricted
context?
ownership of the communications - does an interaction or any of its results
belong to anyone and if so, in what way?
topology - are these one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many
interactions, or something else?
We may then find that particular technologies are designed for, and well suited to,
some of these kinds of language use. And we may be less likely to make dismissive
claims such as that the Internet is CB (citizen band) radio for the 1990s (as many
cynical people once said).
We will certainly find that the designers of the technology do not always anticipate
the new kinds of language activity that will come from the ways that people use and
adapt it. Think, for instance, of gramophone recording (a late 19th century
technology) and text-messaging from and to mobile telephones (a late 20th century
invention). Both of these developed in ways that their inventors did not foresee, but
which we can now explain readily after having seen it happen.
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The first gramophone or phonograph recordings were made to capture the
spoken voice. Yet in time, this technology would emerge as especially well
suited to recording musical performances for later playback. (We might add
that Edison's idea for recording sound gained massively when it was used in
conjunction with Marconi's idea of radio broadcasting: the sound recordings
made music affordable to a wide audience, but the playing of recordings on
radio gave the music a reach that is almost ubiquitous.)
Text messaging is an adaptation of the idea of mobile phone designers to use a
simple text display to give the user information about the functions of the
handset. Since this information was being displayed on a phone, it soon
became apparent that one could use it for entering free text, that the user could
transmit, by using the same underlying technology as the voice calls - and that
these packets of information would be far smaller, and less costly to transmit.
What the service providers could anticipate generally (but almost certainly
without foreseeing the scale of its later popularity) was that users would like to
be able to do this. (The assumption was more that we would use the
technology for broadcast messages, such as weather or traffic information,
than for personal interactions.)
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Does technology make a difference to language use?
Storing and transmitting information | Electronic text and digitized information |
Instant communication across geographical space | Linking to other electronic texts
and processes | Automatic recording of computer activity | Echoing previous genres
and technologies | Challenging notions of fixity and authority | How technology
influences new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols
In studying language and technology, you will look at how the technology influences
the language use, but you should not assume that the use of technology to mediate the
language necessarily changes everything.
All kinds of circumstances can affect the way we use language. Using technology
may do this - as we may note from the way that some speakers react to a journalist's
microphone, or an invitation to leave a message on a telephone answering machine.
But we should not suppose that, in the absence of such obvious technology, people
speak in a neutral and "natural" way. Whereas in the past, some kinds of formal or
rhetorical speaking were regarded as meritorious, and social conversation less well
regarded, so now we can make the opposite mistake, and assume that spontaneous
speaking of an unstructured kind, using many non-standard terms and constructions,
is somehow more natural or authentic (and worthy of study) than more controlled or
self-conscious utterance, using standard forms.
Technology can allow us to eavesdrop on conversations legitimately, as when we
listen to a radio or TV broadcast. It also allows us to read texts from a greater range of
writers - where traditional publishing is more selective and exclusive. And it allows us
to read writing that has not been regulated and corrected by editors to conform to
standard orthography or house style.
As with traditional publishing, where we do not know how many people have revised
or edited the text that we eventually read, so also we cannot always know the process
that has produced a text that we read or hear through a technological medium. We
listen to a studio discussion on a radio broadcast, and picture the guests together - but
do not realize that two of them are with the presenter in London, while a third is in a
studio somewhere else. We listen to a conversation in a fly-on-the-wall documentary,
and do not know how the effects of editing - of selection and omission - have changed
it.
Tim Shortis (Shortis, T., 2000, The Language of ICT, London, Routledge, ISBN 0415-22275-3) suggests that the distinctive features of electronic text are that it:
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Enables storage and transmission of diverse information.
Includes electronic typed text and/or digitised information.
Allows instant communication across geographical space.
Can be linked to other electronic texts and processes.
Keeps a record of its "history" automatically.
Echoes previous genres and technologies.
Challenges notions of fixity and authority.
Is conducive to new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols.
Let's elaborate each of these suggestions.
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Storing and transmitting information
It is easy to show objectively how technology has made it easier to store and transmit
information - simply observing the number of documents generally, or of a specific
type (say Web logs) on the World Wide Web demonstrates this. Likewise, it is an
objective fact that a technology such as e-mail allows the instantaneous transmission
of a large text document, with other kinds of data file attached to it, between any
computers in the world that are connected to the Internet. And it is also an objective
fact that the number of computers connected to the Internet (either occasionally or
permanently) is also increasing.
You can easily demonstrate this by conducting searches of the World Wide Web. In a
split second, you will turn up thousands, maybe millions, of documents in which the
search item occurs. I asked Google (http://www.google.com ) to search for "cat" - in
0.07 seconds it found 155 million documents in which this text string occurs.
"Coffee" yields 52 million documents in 0.17 seconds. But one could never look at
more than a tiny proportion of them all.
Thus, the sheer volume of activity also challenges the user. In the Renaissance, it was
possible for an educated person to know the titles and authors of most printed books
in a given language, and perhaps to have read a sizeable proportion of them. The
Bodleian Library in Oxford could aspire, through an agreement of 1610, to own a
copy of every book published by the Stationers' Company - and for a while the
librarians could still have an understanding of the complete contents of their shelves.
But now, as a copyright library in the 21st century, the Bodleian receives some 1,500
volumes a week (75,000 a year). No individual can have more than an outline
understanding of all of the extant printed texts. For every book that we know (a large
number, perhaps) there are many thousands or more of lost, forgotten, hidden and
unknown volumes.
What is true of the production of print texts is equally true of digital texts - in trying to
form a sense of the totality of such data, we can only make the most rudimentary and
heavily qualified statements.
Nor does the technology that keeps it extant temporarily, provide it with a permanent
home: like the private letters and documents of individuals in past times, it is
distributed among millions of digital storage devices. The very thing that enables us to
store so much, and share it so swiftly, also makes these texts vulnerable to loss. An
old book may survive for centuries but electronic storage is not so enduring. Indeed,
digital publishing may have more in common with book production by manuscript in
the ancient world - here texts were kept alive by a continual process of copying and
distribution, replacing the old as they wore out, which for us may resemble the
process of adapting information from one format or storage medium to a successor.
Electronic text and digitized information
Tim Shortis lists these together, but the first is of course only one of many examples
of the second. In every case "digitized" information is really a series of 1s and 0s in
the binary machine code that enables a computer or other device to represent the
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information in some other format, so that humans can experience it - such as an image
(still or moving), a high-fidelity audio track or a text document that we can read, write
or edit within the interface of a word processor, text editor or instant messenger.
The technologist has found many ways to do more things because digital information
can be used across a wider range of devices that are inexpensive to manufacture. (At
an even more highly technical level, this is because these devices use principles of
solid-state physics, so there are no moving parts.) Some of the most popular
applications of digitized information are very closely modelled on analogue
technologies - such as voice telephony, and TV and radio broadcasting (indeed the
broadcasting bit of the process is not changed; the difference lies in the nature of what
is broadcast - so now the same ultra-high frequency and very-high frequency radio
waves carry signals that are decoded as digital information by the receiving device).
Recording to CD, DVD, mp3 players and hard drives also mimics recording to audio
and videotape.
While Tim Shortis may be right to single out text as a most important language form
that digital information can represent, I suggest that speech is not far behind.
Information technology can convert any audio source into digital information (and
reverse the process), so we can use this for
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recording speech (or music, or birdsong),
interacting with it (for example by mixing tracks, or altering the audio
properties) and
relaying it instantly (as in Internet telephony, or, more crudely, an audio
facility in an Instant Messenger program).
Increasingly the technology allows the end user to decide which of many possible
interactions he or she will use. Over time, this enables the designer (without any need
for expensive market research) to attend to improving the features people find most
useful, and not to bother with those that people do not use so much. An example
would be an Instant Messenger client program (a program that is installed on a
computer or local device or storage area, from where it exchanges information with
remote servers over a network - usually the public Internet). Such a program may
have a facility for instant text chat, display of emoticons in the text, shared Web
browsing (typing a recognized URL creates a live hyperlink), display of an
environment, games and other tools (such as an area for shared drawing of pictures), a
whiteboard (for shared presentations), application sharing, and sharing of live moving
images over Web cams and of speech via microphones and speakers connected to an
audio system in each user's computer. It is possible that someone might use all of
these, but in reality most users limit themselves to the first and one or two others at
most. On the other hand, this greater flexibility allows the technology to mimic more
closely what happens in face-to-face meetings. I used to talk to you (in the same
room), and show you some pictures in an album; now I chat to you (we are in
different rooms) and send you the pictures (as data files) or point you to the document
on the World Wide Web where they are displayed. Face to face, I might draw a
diagram then pass it to you for you to add something (how you want to furnish a room
or landscape your garden, say). The Instant Messenger allows us to do the same thing
remotely.
This may help refute a common misunderstanding among people who do not use
computers - that the experience is socially impoverished, because so many elements
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of face-to-face meeting are missing. Increasingly, those other kinds of interaction,
which might co-exist with speech, are available. But there are also new features that
enrich the experience. We do not normally record spoken conversation (the presence
of recording technology can inhibit our ability to speak in a way we regard as natural).
But conversation in the form of Instant Messenger text produces a transcript that we
can save (if we wish) or copy into other applications.
Instant communication across geographical space
Technologies for instant communication over distances go back to the ancient world,
and more recent times where heliography (using mirrors or lamps), semaphore and
naval flags or loud musical instruments have been used for conveying orders and
simple messages in battle. Technology has also served purposes for business in such
differing areas as finance (where Edison's 1871 stock ticker used telegraphy to bring
information to the New York Stock Exchange) and gambling (where radio and TV
would broadcast horse races in betting shops).
The Internet was originally developed as a resilient communications network for
military purposes (resilient because it has so many nodes, and therefore possible
routes from one point to another, that it would still work even if much of the network
should be destroyed).
So what is significant or distinctive about the instant communication provided by
modern technologies?
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Its use is not confined to the owners of the systems (such as national
governments) and those wealthy enough to pay them for that use (such as
businesses) - but is now available either free at the point of use (as in public
libraries and schools in much of Europe) or as an affordable domestic
technology.
The underlying communications protocols are integrated with systems that do
many other things and that are adaptable: it is relatively expensive to upgrade
a telephone or TV receiver, as we usually need to discard and replace a
manufactured object*; it is relatively inexpensive to upgrade or extend
software products on one's personal computer or on a remote network - so
inexpensive that many providers of such products give them away in return for
showing the user advertisements or gathering information about us.
*Increasingly devices like mobile telephones, personal music players (mp3
players and iPods) or personal digital assistants are manufactured with the
potential to be extended by changing the electronic operating system - the
firmware (software stored in programmable memory). Typically this would
happen by connecting the device to a computer, or directly to a network, and
copying the new firmware from the computer or a location on the Internet.
One obvious adverse consequence of this intelligence in the system is its
vulnerability to malicious actions - and, indeed, there are now "viruses" that
can damage mobile phones.
The technology can span any geographical distance; increasingly it can do so
while the user is moving and not connected physically to any network. It is
possible to send and receive e-mail or browse the World Wide Web while
flying in an aeroplane. Despite airline regulations to the contrary, it is possible
to send and receive messages using mobile telephones. Perhaps the best
illustration of this would be the experience of the lone round-the-world sailor,
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Ellen MacArthur who kept continuously in touch with the world via an
Internet connection:
"Twenty-eight-year-old Ellen relied on the Inmarsat Fleet system to
keep in touch with base by voice and e-mail, to send pre-recorded video
messages, and for video conferencing at speeds of up to 128 kbit/s. The
mini-C systems supplied frequent course, heading and speed
information, which was relayed to millions following the attempt via the
web or e-mail. She also used the Inmarsat systems to access navigational
information and for real-time weather updates during her round-theworld adventure. MacArthur's doctor kept a constant eye on her health
via the Inmarsat system, while her technical team used it to monitor the
condition of the vessel throughout the gruelling 71-day voyage."
Quoted from http://about.inmarsat.com/news
Linking to other electronic texts and processes
Operating systems | Application software | Data files and formats | Linking across
platforms and technologies | Multitasking
I suggest that the most significant difference for the individual user of digital
information is that he or she can adapt, interact with, and generally control it in ways
that were not readily possible with other kinds of information, or, indeed, where a
manufacturer could prevent such interaction as a way of enforcing a copyright
restriction. A second difference is that digital technology allows more interoperability
- cine film and recording to a 45 rpm disc, for instance, cannot easily mix, but it is
easy to record sounds in one digital format, images in another, and combine them to
make a movie for playing back on a computer or other device.
Let's think about that a bit more thoroughly. Traditional technologies (as in white
goods like refrigerators and washing machines) rarely have any kind of
interoperability. Many of them will be powered by a standard domestic electricity
supply - but the fridge does not (yet) normally communicate with the cooker or the
kettle*.
*Since the turn of the 21st century, however, an Internet fridge has been available
from several manufacturers. The Whirlpool Internet Fridge, for example, has these
features, according to the manufacturer's Australian Web site:
"The Whirlpool Internet fridge is designed to become a key hub for the
operation of other networked appliances within on-line homes of the not
too distant future. Capabilities of the fridge include:
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Connectivity with other appliances (for example ovens and microwaves)
Recipe downloads (complete with automatic programming of ovens to preheat etc.)
Refrigerator energy management
Refrigerator self-diagnosis for repair purposes
Refrigerator contents inventory (bar coding) for automatic ordering of items
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Internet access
Virtual fridge magnets
Family diary Technology for future applications including automated
stock replenishment, family photo album and a link to home security
and information systems are also currently being developed."
Quoted from http://www.whirlpool.com.au
Other technologies, especially electronic entertainment systems, have interoperability
designed in. A hi-fi amplifier from 1974 could amplify an output from a CD player
from 1994 because the latter used a standard kind of signal output and strength, as
well as a standard kind of physical connection. Television receivers, DVD and HVS
players and digiboxes for satellite TV reception all "talk" to each other (though the
user can be challenged in setting up the connections and learning to use them
together).
The personal computer extends the idea of interoperability in an almost infinite
direction. Competing manufacturers work to a standard design in which various
components are interchangeable. The computer has a range of connection devices and
systems that enable it to exchange information with other physical devices, such as
printers, scanners, cameras, microphones, TV receivers, and many networking
components (wireless access points, routers and switches), and thus, of course, other
computers.
But the interoperability goes way beyond that, to the software inside the computer.
Beyond the basic input-output system (or bios) that tells the computer about itself
when it "boots" up (the verb reflects the old metaphor of pulling oneself up by one's
own bootstraps - an apparent impossibility which computer engineers have made a
reality) - lie the operating software, the application software and the data files.
Operating systems
The operating system software (or OS) is the low-level software, which handles the
interface to peripheral hardware, schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a
default interface to the user when no application program is running. Most modern
operating systems include a graphical user interface (GUI) as standard, so
increasingly we include this in our idea of what an operating system is. Examples of
operating systems would be Microsoft Windows and Linux (for PCs), Mac OS (for
Apple Macintosh computers) and Solaris for Sun workstations.
The user is often not aware of the operating system (except when confronted by the
"Blue Screen of Death" - the nickname for the "Fatal exception error" message in the
Windows 95 and 98 operating systems). But it is fundamental to the use of the
computer to run specific applications, and for those applications to be able to do
things together. (My word-processor can exchange live data with my spreadsheet
application and my Web browser, only because they all share a global syntax within
the operating system.)
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Application software
The modern personal computer (Apple Mac or Windows or Linux PC, say) began life
as a relatively high-cost device for business productivity, as did many of the add-on
devices we refer to collectively as peripherals - printers and scanners, for example. In
a very short time the manufacturers' and resellers' competition for business customers
made the price affordable for home users, which in turn influenced the development
of the PC to include features for entertainment, and later for personal/social (not
work-related) communication.
The first computer applications were specifically intended for business activity. The
spreadsheet (invented in 1979 by Dan Bricklin who never patented it) was largely
responsible for the introduction of personal computers in many areas of business.
Over time these applications have been adopted by users in other contexts, and
adapted for such use. (So the spreadsheet becomes both a powerful tool for business
users, with a high price tag, and a more customized tool for managing domestic
accounts and paying bills, with a smaller price tag to match the customer's wallet or
purse.)
In the 21st century, the uses of office productivity software (spreadsheets, database
management programs and word-processing) are widespread, almost universal, in
business, commerce, education and administration. Increasingly for the domestic user
the important applications are those used for leisure, entertainment and
communication. This does not mean what are often loosely called "computer games" which are a more defined and specific kind of application. Typically it may include,
rather:
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Browsers - for viewing documents on the World Wide Web and interacting
with them.
Image editing and album programs.
Communications - e-mail, instant messaging and message boards.
Media players - for playing audio and video files, and organizing them in
collections and play lists.
File-sharing applications - for exchanging data files with other users over
networks, especially the Internet.
When we link digital information from one process to another, while using a
computer, then we are almost certainly using one or more applications.
Data files and formats
If you use a computer, you will probably at some point have selected text or an image
in an open document running in one application (a Web page, say, or a wordprocessed document), copied it, and pasted it into another document (in another
application or the same one). You may not think how odd it is that you can do this,
but from time to time you will be frustrated by not being able to do it. For example,
you see some text in a document, try to copy it and find that you cannot. Among
various possible reasons are these:
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What appears to you as text (you can read the words) is actually an image
embedded in the document.
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The text is a graphic object in, say, a Flash movie file.
The text is displayed in a portable document file (PDF), and the creator of the
file has set the file properties to prevent copying.
Really (for the very technically-minded) this is the same explanation in every case.
The Flash movie does not use text but converts a text input into graphic information.
The PDF file, likewise, seems to be text but is really a description of what a document
(text or graphics or both) looks like so that a printer or monitor can display it to the
user.
Oh, yes, you say - so how come we can sometimes copy text from a portable
document file, and then paste it into another application? The answer to that is that if
a word-processed document is converted into the PDF format, then any text in the
original is identified as such. This means that a reader program such as Adobe Reader
is able to reverse the process by character recognition (more or less what happens in
OCR software) and show the original text. If the original for the PDF is simply a
facsimile copy (as when you scan a printed document, copy it and drop the result into
a word-processor file as an image that fills the page) then the reader software will not
be able to copy text, because strictly speaking there isn't any. It now really is a picture
of the page. And you would not, either, be able to copy text from a word-processed
document that really showed a picture of scanned text.
If you can't follow this, don't worry. The point of this rather technical digression is to
show how these are exceptions to a very widely honoured rule - that many designers
of software use standard data formats (admittedly for their own convenience, because
they can use character sets and screen fonts that are already designed). As a result, the
user can often take information from one application and drop it into another, so that
the applications become complementary. Where the process may require some
adaptation there are often filters for importing or exporting the data where the user
can customize the way the exchange will work. To take a very simple example, if we
copy text from a document open in a Web browser, then as well as the text, we have a
lot of information about its formatting (line breaks, font styles and sizes, and so on).
In a word processor such as MS Word, if we paste the text, then much of this
formatting information will be retained (with pleasing or annoying consequences, and
certainly increasing the size of the resulting file). Alternatively we can choose a
"paste special" option, and paste the text, and display it in ways that we can choose.
For example, if we choose "unformatted text", then the result will be to show the
copied text in whatever was the style of the passage into which we pasted it.
Linking across platforms and technologies
Digital information is always intelligible, if one has the key. I could use a computer
with a CD drive and a CD writer drive to make an exact copy of an audio CD, without
the need for the copying computer to be able to play such CDs. (Usually it will be
able to do this, but that's not the point; the point is that a suitable application could
record an exact description of the digital information on the original, then burn it to
the copy without going through the quite different process of translating the
information into an audio output to be played in real time on the PC. If that seems
either to be hard to follow, or blindingly obvious, then reflect on how long it takes to
play a CD - it takes as long as the various tracks together, which may be more than an
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hour. But, depending, on the speed of your equipment, you may be able to make a
copy in a few minutes.)
It is possible to use technologies to translate audible speech into text and vice versa.
These might seem to be tasks of comparable difficulty, but are in fact massively
different. Text-to-speech is a robust, inexpensive and very accurate technology - the
reader software typically
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recognizes some whole words,
many more morphemes (such as affixes), and
uses a kind of guesswork based on characters for anything else.
For any given text string there is a programmed audio output. The software does not
have any way of determining emphasis, so produces exactly the same speech sounds
(for each text string) in a monotone. Although a human listener would hear a
representation of the text that he or she could understand (so that the text really
resembles speech) from the point of view of the software (if I may be so
anthropomorphic) the output is still produced by an interaction with a text file.
Speech recognition software is more complex because it has to cope with massive
individual variety in the speech sounds it sets out to interpret. For this reason, the user
has to "train" it to recognize which text strings correspond to a given spoken output,
and also has to learn some consistency in the spoken style of dictation. This means it
is expensive, uses lots of system resources (many computers cannot cope with it) and
still is haphazard unless the user spends a lot of time in training it.
Multitasking
The idea or promise of multitasking goes back to the early 1990s, when few personal
computers had the system resources (mainly random access memory) needed to make
it a possibility, without slowing down the activity of the various applications charged
with the multiple tasks. Improvements in the performance and system resources of
computers mean that it is now possible to run many applications and tasks at the same
time. This greatly increases the possibility for what Tim Shortis calls "linking to other
texts and processes". We can illustrate this by use of alternative scenarios, a decade
apart, for achieving the same goal of preparing a piece of written coursework for
assessment in an exam course.
1995 scenario
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A student sits in a lesson, as her teacher talks, and makes what she calls notes,
by hand on a pad or in an exercise book.
At home, later, she reads the handwritten notes and opens a new document in a
word processor.
Having transcribed some of the notes, the student makes a telephone call to a
friend to discuss what they remember, collectively, of the lesson (not very
much, it turns out).
After drafting a section of a language investigation, the student prints out a
copy.
She takes it to school the next day and hands it to a teacher who is supervising
the work.
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The teacher takes it home, reads it, and annotates the printed text by hand.
A week later the teacher discusses the draft with the student.
Later she takes it home again, opens the saved document, and adds new
material, while revising the existing text, in response to the teacher's notes and
spoken comments.
2005 scenario
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During a lesson, a student makes text notes on a laptop or handheld personal
digital assistant (PDA), or records some spoken comments on the same device
or an iPod.
After the lesson she uses a computer in a study centre to make further notes,
and sends these to herself in an e-mail message, or simply saves them in a
storage area on a Web server.
At home the student transfers any data on the PDA or iPod to a computer,
while picking up the notes sent from school.
Any text notes she pastes into the draft coursework document, or a separate
document that serves as a scratchpad.
The student signs into an instant messenger like MSN or Yahoo. Seeing a
friend also logged in, she displays a status message: "Working on
investigation". The friend displays a new status message: "Shall we discuss
it?"
The student starts a conversation with the friend, while keeping the document
open. To explain parts of it, the student simply copies passages of text, and
drops these into the messenger conversation. Or, if need be, she can send the
whole document file to the other person.
They decide to ask for the opinion of another friend, who does not have
regular Internet access, and is not able to use the instant messenger. The
second student makes a mobile telephone call to the third, and relays his ideas
(spoken over the phone) to the first student, through the instant messenger
conversation.
It becomes clear to the first student that she has done part of the task very
well, but now needs to consult the supervising teacher. So she saves her work
and sends an e-mail message to the teacher, attaching the draft document, or
posts the document on a message-board or virtual learning environment that
they both use.
That's enough work for the evening, and the three friends arrange (by IM and
phone) to go to the pub or, if they are too young for this, to meet in the house
of one of them.
The teacher, who has just dropped off his own teenage daughter at a friend's
house, returns home to find an e-mail message has arrived from the student.
He opens the attached document, reads it, and at once sees what she needs to
move on with the investigation. He appends notes to the document (using a
different colour of text), saves it with a new version name and number, and
sends it back.
The student comes back from the pub and goes to bed. Next morning she has
directed study time; by agreement she works from home, where she checks her
e-mail, and finds the annotated coursework.
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The teacher's message sends her to several Web sites, makes clear something
in the student's notes that seemed confusing the previous evening, and also
includes the e-mail address of an expert in her chosen area of study, with a
suggestion that she contact this person to seek some further guidance.
This second scenario takes far longer to describe, but occupies less time, more
efficiently, in reality. And the technology ensures that each process links to the others
(mostly), while there are far fewer points (such as recalling lessons and making notes
after the event) at which understanding can be lost in translation or transmission…
However, the description shows that this approach is complex to understand (rather in
the same way that the combination of things involved in driving a car is complex). For
many people it is not intuitive, and they may prefer to use the old methods. While the
potential saving of time is great, many learners and teachers may be reluctant to take
the time they need to learn these new approaches. Or the student does not think of
doing so, because he or she sees that the teacher will not be able to support this way
of learning. As a result, the learning activities in many institutions become less
homogeneous as some teachers use the new technologies coherently, while others use
them selectively, or perhaps resist their use.
Automatic recording of computer activity
Electronic text, says Mr. Shortis, keeps a record of its history automatically. The user
can choose to discard or delete it (though even then, many computer systems will
keep a copy of the data from which that record can be restored, before a more
permanent act of deletion).
How does this work?
In the case of electronic mail we can choose to keep copies of everything that we send
and receive. For things that we receive we often have the further choice of keeping a
copy on a local computer and leaving the message on the mail server (a computer
connected to the Internet from which a client mail program brings the messages, as
they arrive, to the user's computer or other device, such as a PDA).
With text chat, in an instant messenger, the full conversation is stored temporarily in
the messenger client window (the interface of the program that is showing the session
to the user). When we finish the conversation we can choose to save it (usually as a
text file) or discard it (though in this case, we may have set our user preferences for
the software so that a copy is kept automatically in an archive for a specified period).
This is not something that we can do with a spoken conversation.
Interestingly, too, the user normally knows that the script of the conversation is
retained in this way, but that seems not to inhibit the text messaging, as sound
recording devices may do with spoken conversation.
Not only that, because of the ability to link this with other processes one can use this
automatic recording in various productive or creative ways. If one uses instant
messaging to discuss some area of learning with an expert, then there is no need
subsequently to make notes, beyond perhaps tidying up and formatting the text of the
15
discussion. The same can also be true of e-mail exchanges. We can store the text as it
is, or paste it into another document.
Echoing previous genres and technologies
How ICT texts retain or preserve features of older texts | How ICT texts differ from
older texts
How ICT texts retain or preserve features of older texts
Tim Shortis suggests that language use through information technology echoes
previous genres and technologies. This is not really surprising, but to be expected.
Human beings, faced with a new technology, may use it
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in ways that resemble the uses to which they have put earlier technologies, or
more simply still,
to achieve the purposes they have achieved with other kinds of spoken and
written text hitherto.
At its most basic, this may be something as straightforward as publishing, on the
World Wide Web, texts such as news reports, film reviews and recipes more or less
equivalent to those found in print media, such as newspapers and magazines. These
do not, in daily use, replace the print versions, but complement them - so, for
example, I read today's report in a newspaper that I recycle; but if I want a report from
last month, I can search an archive with a Web browser.
Here are some less obvious examples.
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In genteel society, as depicted, for example, in Jane Austen's novels, there has
for some time been a practice of one's being ready to receive visitors, should
they call, by being "at home" to them. The sending of invitations that indicate
a time when the sender will be "at home" to the recipient, who is expected to
reply, complements this. Interestingly, while the invitation is written in
English, the acronym requesting a response derives from French (RSVP
meaning répondez s'il vous plaît). Users of instant messenger programs (such
as ICQ, MSN/Windows Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger) use a
similar etiquette. In the Yahoo client program, for example, one can be simply
"Available", have "Stepped out" (no indication of when one will return), be
"Out to lunch" (the intention here is literal, not metaphorical), say one will "Be
right back" or display any other status message of the user's own devising. The
point here is that, just like Jane Austen's gentlefolk, the user is advertising to
all his or her chosen acquaintances, a readiness to receive a digital visit.
The similarities to the older etiquette continue in other ways. Sometimes a
person would be literally in his or her home, but not "at home" to visitors - not
willing, that is, to allow them to visit. The user of the Instant Messenger can
display a message such as "busy", accompanied by an image resembling a "no
entry" sign as used on some road systems. Or he or she can use the messenger
to see other users who are "available", while appearing to be offline, by
choosing the "invisible" status. Just as an 18th century gentleman could visit
too frequently, and start to find his intended hosts to be not "at home" to him,
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so the Instant Messenger could allow the user to "visit" other people
excessively - but in use, it has a self-adjusting tendency (the user learns when
other people wish to talk or not). Unlike the older etiquette, however, the
Instant Messenger does not have the facility to show the user as being "at
home" to some people but not to others.
It even has the equivalent of the old calling card - left by the visitor who found
someone out or not "at home". This is the "offline message", sent in the
understanding that the recipient is not online and able to read it now, but that
he or she will see it on next signing in to the messenger service.
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Another example would be the news ticker. This was originally an application
of telegraphy, which allowed the transmission of information about stock
prices. The ticker displayed information about stocks on a moveable tape, and
later on a large scrolling electronic display. This technology was soon adapted
by news organizations to collect information for newspapers and broadcast
news, where the stories on the ticker tape would come from agencies such as
Reuters. Now television and digital radio both use a news ticker display. On
TV this commonly appears as scrolling text at the bottom of the screen superimposed on a studio background, for example. On digital radio, most
receivers have a liquid crystal display area, which can display information
about the device in a menu format, but which is set by default to display
scrolling captions that give news or information about the channel or current
broadcast.
In the 20th century, many groups of friends would use the round robin or
correspondence magazine. This contained a series of letters or other
contributions from a set number of writers, who were also the readers. On
receiving the magazine, each contributor would read the new contents, remove
his or her previous entry, and insert a new one - possibly written before the
arrival of the magazine. The contributor might also be expected to make a new
cover for the contents. Then he or she would send the magazine to the next
person on the mailing list, who would repeat the process. The ICT equivalent
of this is the message board, which allows serial contributions. In both cases,
occasional face-to-face ("real-world") meetings complement the reading and
writing.
How ICT texts differ from older texts
However, behind this continuity lies an arguably more profound characteristic of new
technologies:
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The inventor and developer intend them to make some existing or established
action more effective and powerful, but
the end users find different actions that they perform even more effectively.
An example would be the mobile phone. This was developed to provide the benefits
of voice telephony without the restrictions of physical location from which landline
telephones suffer. In developing the physical device, the inventors used liquid crystal
display technology to give the user assistance, for example in storing numbers and
selecting people to call.
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Since the display was already attached to a telephone, the possibility of using the
display to compose and send text messages would be self-evident. Tim Shortis
suggests it was: "an afterthought; another gimmick to help beat the competition", but
this is not substantiated, and does not make sense: while texting was an "afterthought"
in the way that all refinements of systems are, the "competition" (all the service
providers) adopted the use of the messaging universally, and it was not a gimmick but
a serendipitous and obvious combined use of two technologies the mobile phone
companies had already developed - sending data digitally and displaying text on the
phone's LCD screen.
With hindsight, it is easy to explain the popularity of the system - it is discreet
(compared to spoken conversation) and inexpensive for the service provider (the
sending of a message requires the user to be connected for only a split second, so the
cost to the user can be set at a very low rate, and yet earn the service provider more
income than voice calls, which require the user to be continuously connected).
Hindsight can also explain some of the conventional abbreviations, acronyms and
emoticons that enable the sender to keep messages within a limit of a set number of
characters: currently (2005) for most services this is 160 Latin or 80 non-Latin
characters. It is likely that developments in the SMS technology will allow longer
messages in the future, although many users already work around this by sending
multiple messages as part of a monologue or (more commonly, as the recipient
replies) a dialogue.
"Texting is free on my service, and even those who pay will usually pay less than for
speaking mobile to mobile. Texting is also useful if you are in the London
Underground and can't get any reception or are in a club and can't hear your phone.
and if you want to send the same message to several people, texting is quicker than
talking," explains Rachel Fletcher, 21. (Source: Nottingham Evening Post, cited on
http://www.text.it) .
Text messaging has some of the characteristics of spoken conversation (in its
pragmatics and lexicon) and some of the characteristics of personal letters (in its
pragmatics, again, in its register, and in its relative informality as regards grammar
and orthography). But as a mode of communication it is not wholly like anything else.
In looking at examples of text messaging in use, you may wish to separate
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your discoveries of what people do when they send and respond to text
messages, from
various explanations of why they exhibit this linguistic behaviour.
Challenging notions of fixity and authority
The relative affordability of information and communication technology means that it
brings power to the people. In earlier times various technologies were so expensive
and conspicuous that the state could regulate their availability (whether for its own
purposes, or for sale to wealthy businesses and individuals). That still happens in
some ways, as national governments sell licences to providers of services and portion
out the available wavelengths for radio and television broadcasts.
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The scenario predicted by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four
turns out to be profoundly mistaken. Orwell imagines a world in which a handful of
totalitarian states keep their populations in poverty, engage in constant wars with no
intention of defeating the enemy and, above all, seek to control not only people's
actions, but also their very thoughts, by controlling all the print and broadcast media
and technologies. Orwell supposes that the tendency of individuals to invent and
adapt their uses of language can be suppressed, while a single state-sponsored set of
language conventions ("Newspeak") establishes itself in everyone's usage.
Orwell is wrong in his attitude to this kind of linguistic dissidence. Because it is not
voluntary, it is not subject to control. Even under some dire threat, some human
speakers will think and say unorthodox things, and many more will use language in
non-standard ways, because they have a different understanding of grammar or of the
lexicon from what is prescribed.
He is even more wrong in his assumption that political states will continue to control
the technologies of communication. While governments have been able to regulate
print media and broadcasting to a point, they have not been able to prevent radio and
TV signals crossing frontiers. Arguably, the Berlin Wall fell because East Germans
compared their own government's accounts of the west with the evidence of western
radio and TV broadcasting, which showed a more materially comfortable lifestyle and
the opportunity for a diversity of opinions on political, moral and social questions.
Internet technologies allow great scope to the individual to write or speak, publish or
broadcast, read or listen. In many cases other people and organizations may try to
restrict that scope. The restriction may come from
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a national government (as in China's regulation of Internet cafés, and blocking
of some Web sites),
an employer (as in blocking of some technologies and Web sites, or
enforcement of appropriate use policies at work), or
a parent (as in controls on children's use of Internet technologies).
In spite of all of such restrictions, these technologies do generally promote change and
allow individual expression in ways, and to an extent, that were not possible
previously.
Broadcasters and publishers are agents of change to an extent, as they allow new
forms and new uses onto the airwaves and into print. But they also are agents of
stability (or conservatism, depending on your attitude), in continuing to use forms that
are regarded as standard in relatively formal contexts. We can exemplify this by
noting that popular and informal speech may be heard on talk radio and phone-ins or
on some youth programming on television, but that mainstream radio and TV news
bulletins or documentary programmes use varieties of English that change more
slowly.
For many ICT texts, there is no explicit requirement to use any given conventions.
Ideas of what is appropriate may be determined by an emerging popular consensus,
but are no longer regulated at the outset by commercial publishers, editors and
readers, as they have been in the past for most print texts.
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If I wish to publish a book, then I may be required to accept the policy of the
publishing house in using, say, UK or US English. If I wish to publish a Web log or
Web site, I can make my own choice as regards the language variety. Many new
technologies allow individual and immediate production of texts (without the
hindrance or luxury of a proof-reader or editor). Since the technology is still relatively
new, it perhaps remains to be seen whether this will lead to a general relaxation of
uses of standard forms.
How technology influences new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols
Some people (as any teacher knows) use non-standard ("incorrect" or "bad")
spellings. There is nothing new in this - there is plenty of evidence to show that ever
since Dr. Johnson and Noah Webster helped us to determine some standards, many
real writers have neither known nor conformed to the standard spellings.
What is perhaps different today is that texts containing non-standard spellings may be
seen by far wider audiences. It may also be true that these audiences do not notice, or
do notice but are not much bothered by, the non-standard forms - because they are
more interested in the information or attitudes expressed in the text.
The language student and scientist should guard against a popular (but illogical)
tendency to find fault with the writing or speech of an individual, and then make this
the basis of a claim that "English" is changing for the worse. That is objectively
meaningless or nonsensical. It may be that a greater or less proportion of a given
population (all the people in Britain, all 18-21 year olds in some university, all the
fans of a popular singer or football club) do or do not use the standard spelling of
"adviser" or know the conventional use of the dash. But that does not prevent any
other person from writing with control and flair.
Different technologies influence spelling in different ways. Spell-checking tools in
application software enable the user to eliminate non-standard forms, though they do
not show where a writer uses a standard form of a lexeme other than the one he or she
intends. So, for instance, one finds increasingly commonly that "lead" (the present
tense and infinitive form of the verb "to lead") is written in contexts requiring the past
participle "led" (possibly by confusion with its homophone noun "lead", as in the
heavy metal). It may be that reliance on these tools, too, leads some people to learn
less for themselves about standard forms, in the same way that reliance on the
calculator has apparently led some people to care less about mental arithmetic or
learning multiplication tables.
Modern word-processing tools allow a writer to use a specific variety of a language so I can choose English with the standard spelling and grammar of Belize, Canada,
Ireland, the UK or USA, for example, or exchange my preferred British orthography
for one more suited to an international audience.
Mobile phone texting, by contrast, promotes new forms.
These typically abbreviate the standard form of a word or phrase - by such simple
substitutions as numerals for syllables (be4, 2day, gr8).
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They also rely on the user's awareness of the conventions, which are often explained
in user guides supplied with phones - an Orange mobile phone guide gives a table of
abbreviations, including BCNU ("be seeing you"), F2T ("Free to talk"), PCM ("Please
call me") and THX ("Thanks").
These short forms may be used playfully - they may use fewer characters than the
standard equivalent, but sometimes the "saving" is of a single letter, so that the case
for using the new form balances its possible unfamiliarity against the small economy
achieved, as with 1daful ("wonderful") or WSUUUUU? ("What's up?") - this latter
example reflects its association with a TV and cinema commercial (for Budweiser
beer) where characters telephoned each other to ask this question, massively
elongating the speech sounds.
In many cases (echoing older forms) the text message uses abbreviations used in
sending personal letters (SWALK="sealed with a loving kiss"; this form dates back at
least to the 1950s) or in printed personal messages ("personals"), such as GSOH
("good salary own home" or, confusingly, "good sense of humour").
In studying language and technology, you should perhaps beware of a tendency in
popular reporting and social commentary to exaggerate the importance of new
technologies in influencing patterns of spelling. The new forms may be recorded in
guides and glossaries, but you should look for any evidence that lexicographers are
accepting them as standard.
However, in 2004 some UK teachers of English language reported on an Internet
mailing list discussion forum that they had observed text message forms appearing in
their students' exam work. This is so far anecdotal evidence, and even if accurate does
not yet reflect anything lasting or permanent.
Many ICT tools make use of symbols (emoticons or "smileys") to suggest feelings
and attitudes quickly. The smiling face image pre-dates the emergence of the personal
computer, having been widely used as a badge or transfer for clothing in the 1960s
and later. (It was adopted by evangelical Christians, with the slogan: "Smile, Jesus
loves you", and more than a decade later associated with MDMA, the "recreational"
drug popularly known as Ecstasy.)
The importance of emoticons can be exaggerated. David Crystal claims that:
"Very few of them are ever used. Surveys of email and chatgroups suggest that only
about 10 per cent of messages actually use them, and then usually just the two basic
types - :) and :( . Yet they still exercise a fascination: as an art form, or for
entertainment." Crystal, D (2004), A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak, p. 119,
Edinburgh, ISBN 0-7486-1982-8
I would qualify this. Instant messenger clients and some message boards allow the
user to insert emoticons by a simple mouse click. These display as images (sometimes
animated) in the client program or Web browser. Using these technologies with a
wide range of contacts (both sexes and all ages from young children upwards)
suggests that most users insert some emoticons, and in some interactions they
frequently punctuate or conclude a sequence of text. They are appropriate where, in
21
face-to-face conversation one would use a gesture or a touch. They are perhaps more
commonly used in mixed and in all-female interactions, than in all-male social
interactions. Janet Baker states that:
"These graphical accents can add expressiveness, emotion and aesthetics to written
discourse. Do these smiley faces at the end of messages provide the reader with an
insight into the author or are they just annoying little punctuation marks that you have
to strain your neck to see. Do people that use emoticons also use emotional language
in their messages? And, do men and women use emoticons in the same way, and with
the same frequency?
The empirical research in this area is inconclusive. Witmer and Katzman (1997)
hypothesized that women use more graphical accents than men in their computermediated discourse. The authors coded over 3,000 messages and found that their
hypothesis was partially supported by the data. Neither gender extensively used
emoticons, with only 13% of the total sample [doing so]. However, the computer
users who did primarily use emoticons were women." Online Emotional Discourse,
http://sjsu.sjweb.net/1/index.html
It may be interesting to reflect that early forms of writing (pre-alphabetic) used
pictorial symbols - whether pictograms (where a picture of an arrow represents an
arrow) or ideograms (where a picture of an arrow represents war).
Although we now use alphabetic writing, this has often been combined
with symbols in specific parts of a text, such as colophons on book
jackets and cover pages or the portcullis symbol, to indicate the crown's
ownership, on documents from Her Majesty's Stationery Office
(HMSO), and imitated by the music publisher Ministry of Sound.
That may help you to remember that, while use of novel spellings,
acronyms, abbreviations and symbols are all relevant to ICT texts, they
did not start life there, nor are they confined to new technologies. All of
them have a long and complex history in writing generally.
At the same time, users of the new technologies may be more conservative than is
commonly supposed or reported. The following extract is summarised from an article
by Kristen Philipkoski, entitled The Web Not the Death of Language. This was
published on February 22nd 2005 at http://www.wired.com
Traditional linguists fear the internet damages our ability to articulate
properly, infusing language with LOLs, dorky emoticons and the gauche
sharing of personal information on blogs. But some researchers believe
we have entered a new era of expression. "
Resources for the expression of informality in writing have hugely
increased - something not seen in English since the Middle Ages," said
David Crystal at the American Academy for the Advancement of
Science annual meeting in Washington, D.C. The internet is getting
more people to write, he said, and that's a great thing.
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"The prophets of doom emerge every time a new technology influences
language, of course - they gathered when printing was introduced in the
15th century," Crystal said. But linguists should be "exulting,"...in the
ability the Internet gives us to "explore the power of the written
language in a creative way."
In the spring of 2003, Naomi Baron collected 23 instant message
conversations from college students: nine between males, nine between
females and five between males and females. She studied 2,185 total
transmissions.
The results did not fit typical stereotypes, she found. They used few
abbreviations, acronyms and emoticons, the spelling was reasonably
good and contractions were not ubiquitous. Overall, the study suggested
that conversing through instant messenger resembled speaking more
than writing.
The college students gave a staid impression of IM communication. The
average length per transmission was 5.4 words; 22 percent were a single
word. Many were parts of sentences - 112 included a conjunction, like
this: "she's a phd student (break) and my TA," and 48 used a
preposition, like this: "what are you bringing (break) on Saturday."
The college students used only 31 abbreviations specific to Internet
communication, 16 of which were "k" for OK. They used just 90
acronyms total, 76 of which were "lol," and they used just 49 emoticons,
mostly smiley faces. Just 171 words were misspelled, and the students
often corrected the spelling in a follow-up. When they could have used
contractions they did so only 65.3 percent of the time.
Men were much more likely to use contractions, Baron found. She also
noted that women took significantly longer to close IM conversations
than males, and males were significantly more likely than females to
break utterances into multiple IM transmissions.
Language and technology over time
The history of technologies for writing | Typesetting and printing | Technologies for
communicating remotely
The history of language and technology is not as old as the history of language, but is
exactly as old as the history of recorded language, which means at first the recording
of language by the use of symbols - pictograms and ideograms.
The history of technologies for writing
In the modern world we take for granted the availability of writing materials and
implements. But just as writing has a history, so has the material used to transmit it.
Some of the most ancient writing in the world that has survived today appears on
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large blocks of stone. This may be a suitable material for important documents that
are meant to be permanent. But fairly early in the history of writing people looked for
a way to make texts more portable.
Around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers smooth river clay abounds. Between 4000
B.C. and 3500 B.C. the Sumerian people who lived in this region found a way to use
this clay as a writing material. To start with, they used picture language, not unlike the
writing of Egypt. Over time, in an evolution we can trace in surviving evidence, the
Sumerians simplified their pictures into basic patterns of a few lines.
The development of this basic writing was also determined by the technology used to
make marks in the clay. This was a tool rather like a pencil but without a lead, and not
sharpened. The writer would press a corner of the end into the clay, making a wedgeshaped line. The writers soon found that by combining five or six such lines or
strokes, in a range of vertical and horizontal positions, they could produce a range of
symbols to cover all objects and ideas about which they might want to write.
For many purposes, however, clay and stone are not practical materials. Suppose one
wants to be able to write down a long story, and keep it in a portable form - how can
one do this using stone as a writing material? The solution to this problem came from
another part of the ancient world, Egypt. The writing of Egypt, like that of the
Sumerians, started as a picture language. Here, too, the pictures became stylized over
time, but less so, because the Egyptians had a more flexible means of writing. Their
writing material was papyrus, a kind of reed, which grows in marsh areas. The soft
pith from inside the tough stems was cut into long strips. These were laid side by side
to form a first layer, after which a second layer was laid on top, at right angles to the
first. Both layers were pressed together, releasing a natural gum, which bonded the
strips together to form paper sheets. These were glued together to form much longer
sheets, which were rolled up for carrying.
The writing implement used by the Egyptians was a reed, frayed at the end, to form a
brush. Later, the Greeks would replace this with a split reed, forming a nib. The nib
enables the writer to control a flow of ink to a finer point. The ink was a mixture of
gum and a colouring agent - soot or lampblack. The scroll was to have a long history
and spread far beyond Egypt. For the producer, which had a virtual monopoly of the
commercial supply it was a valuable product for foreign trade.
The Egyptians used the well-known hieroglyphics for writing on stone. They soon
found that writing on paper could be swifter if they simplified the writing to a script.
Carving on stone is easier using straight lines, but with a brush and paper, rounded
strokes are possible. Apart from having to dip the pen in ink every so often the scribe
could write continuously (rather as we do with modern pens). The writing on papyrus
developed into a more rounded script in a style known as cursive (which means
"running" in Latin). This form of writing also took its name from the hieros or priest
and is called hieratic script. It marks a kind of transition in the development of
writing, between hieroglyphic and alphabetic script. The Phoenicians are the people
traditionally credited with the move to a system of characters to represent sounds,
rather than whole words - in effect, an alphabet. This development meant that a fairly
small number of symbols could be used, in combinations, to represent all the words in
a spoken language. This was a step of genius, which some languages have never
taken. From this point, it is possible to trace the evolution of different writing systems
that use alphabets (again the name, "alphabet", comes from Greek).
24
Papyrus was the most common material but from the earliest times when they wrote
the books of the Law, the Hebrew scribes would also use leather. From about 200
B.C. onwards another material appeared - which was parchment. The skins of goats
and calves were shaved, split, bleached, hammered and polished to form a smooth
writing surface. This was a more expensive writing material than papyrus, but longer
lasting.
The first books were scrolls, up to thirty metres in length, formed by pasting together
papyrus sheets. For reading, these were unrolled from one end, and rolled up from the
other, to present a manageable portion of text to the reader. The Romans developed a
different kind of book type. This was made of wooden tablets, coated with wax, in
which the writer cut letters with a stylus. These tablets were bound with leather
thongs that passed through holes in the wood. It is easy to see how this gave us our
modern book form. The only big difference was that for many years these books were
written entirely by hand - which is why they are called manuscripts.
Typesetting and printing
While writing has a long history, stretching over many hundreds of years, printing is a
relatively recent invention. Printing with movable clay type appeared in China in the
9th century AD, but the western tradition, from which modern typesetting derives,
begins in 1436 in Germany with the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg. This used
replaceable wooden, and later metal, letters. At first these were limited in number, so
that Gutenberg had to set up a page, print multiple copies, and then take it down, in
order to set up the next page. In 1452 Gutenberg produced a printed version of the
Latin Bible.
Printing was at first an expensive way to produce books, and for many years after its
invention more books were produced in manuscript (hand-copied) than printed form.
Over several centuries the process became faster and more accurate. The greater
availability of type eventually made it possible to leave pages set up. In the 19th
century, Charles Dickens and others were able to publish novels serially in relatively
cheap instalments - perhaps for the first time bringing substantial printed texts to a
mass readership.
Printing may be seen as having two important effects on language in the west.


First, it is an agent of mass literacy - by providing appropriate and affordable
texts in large numbers it encouraged and supported ordinary people in learning
to read.
Second, it is an agent of standardization. Following the publication of Dr.
Johnson's dictionary in 1755, and also prescriptive books on grammar, such as
Robert Lowth's (1762), publishers came to use house styles, which more or
less established certain written forms as a standard.
There is, however, no single universal standard for spelling, as the Oxford and
Cambridge University presses allowed some small differences (such as rules for "-ise"
25
and "-ize"), while Noah Webster uses some variant forms that have become standard
in modern US English.
In contrast to modern computer-mediated publishing methods, the technology used to
print books is expensive, and thus restricted to a few publishing houses. These
publishers tended to be very careful in checking texts before they were produced in
volume (reading what are called proofs), so that English printed books observe - and
indirectly reinforce - use of standard forms, and also special varieties that differ from
the language of everyday speech. Smaller and less expensive presses were in use for
shorter texts, such as playbills or pamphlets, and here there may be more likelihood of
non-standard forms.
Until near the end of the 20th century, English publishing made a strong distinction
between the publisher and the printer. The publisher determines the language forms,
reading the printer's proofs and showing where they are to be altered, if incorrect. The
publisher is also responsible for the content (and liable if it is treasonable or
libellous). The typesetter and printer - seen as skilled artisans - are responsible for
setting up the movable type, printing the pages, and, if need be, collating these and
binding them together. In the 21st century, the publisher's role may seem little
changed, but modern computer technologies have largely replaced the skilled work of
the artisans, as the mass production of all printed texts is performed by machinery
driven by information technologies.
Technologies for communicating remotely
Modern communication technologies have their antecedents in more limited systems
that were developed for broadly similar aims - to overcome boundaries of distance or
time. In some contexts, time is not critical - one can send a message, and allow for a
delay. But there are some contexts where this is not possible.
In the case of fighting a battle on land one can communicate information by showing
a flag or standard, by use of devices that reflect natural light or that show artificial
light (heliography). For more complex methods one can use pairs of flags displayed in
different positions (semaphore). Until very recent times (well into the 20th century),
for some kinds of communication the most reliable method was to send written notes
carried by messengers on horseback, motorcycle or even on foot (usually young men
who were fast runners).
For battles at sea a complex system of signalling by use of flags was used until these
were superseded by heliograph and radio.
From the late 19th century onwards a related set of technologies developed, with the
object of using physical devices to record or transmit natural speech. Recording
technologies began with the phonograph, which evolved into the gramophone disc or
record. Later came the use of magnetic tape, in the reel-to-reel and compact cassette
recorders (as well as the short-lived four track and eight track cartridge formats). At
the same time, radio found ways to convert physical sounds to electromagnetic waves,
while telephony found ways to use the physical properties of sound to produce a
variable electric current; the same variations, arriving in the receiver, cause a
corresponding vibration which the user hears as an approximation of human speech.
26
Beginning to study language and technology
In some areas of language study, you may start with an open mind or blank sheet,
because you think you do not know the subject. This may be the case with the early
history of English or pragmatics, say. When you learn a little more, you may find,
after all, that you did have some useful knowledge to start with. In the case of ICT
texts, you may face the opposite danger. Because, in one way, you are very familiar
with such texts both as author and audience, then you may expect to translate that
familiarity easily into firm knowledge about how such texts work.
As you begin, you should be ready to challenge any unsubstantiated assumptions - or
at least look for supporting evidence and interpretation for any general claims that
others make. Even where you see a convincing interpretation of a given ICT text, you
may want to ask how far this text (and the interpretation of it) is typical of ICT texts
generally.
However, you should certainly begin by looking at some evidence. If you already
have some ideas about what the evidence might show you, that is all right, so long as
you are ready to accept a different view, if this is what the evidence does show you.
How to acquire example texts
Suitable texts | How to obtain texts
In making a collection of ICT texts, you may wish to think about two quite different
parts of your approach.


The process of obtaining texts (in a practical and technical sense).
Selecting suitable texts from the mass of possible data.
Let's take the second of these first, as it is arguably more important to the language
student, and can be more briefly explained.
Suitable texts
In one sense it is not only right, but also helpful in some kinds of investigation, to
select a narrower range of language data from a wider collection. Very crudely, if I
have a large collection of transcribed text messages, and if I wish to study the
pragmatics of text messaging in mixed-sex exchanges, then I will use only those data
where a male sends a message to a female recipient and vice versa. That is an
appropriate principle of selection.
But if I then reduce the selection further (to make it manageable), I need some way to
make my selection as close as possible to being representative. If I already have a
theory about what the data might show, then I must make quite sure that I do not
select the data that seem most strongly to support my theory, and leave out the
inconvenient texts. (As you study language science, you may find some examples of
linguists who do this.) To avoid this, I could use some other way to reduce the total
quantity, using some principle of sampling (say, by the name of the collector, the
name of the source, or the date of collecting) that is representative of the whole.
It is very easy to give more weight to the (selective) evidence that appears to prove a
theory. A scientist may do this in good faith, honestly believing that contrary evidence
is the exception that proves (confirms by testing) the rule. For example, you might
27
listen to a post-match discussion on a TV or radio broadcast of a soccer game, and
notice the supportive over-lapping and turn taking among the (male) speakers. You
may have observed something like this on many occasions, but if you have already
decided that men (generally) don't talk like that, while women do, then you may
effectively use the available evidence to support a conclusion opposite to what it
indicates directly.
How to obtain texts
For many kinds of ICT text, obtaining them is as simple as copying data in a range of
formats (either as complete data files, or as data objects, like text and images) and
storing them on a computer or network.
There are reasons why you may wish to have the same data saved in different ways for example as unformatted plain text or as text and images formatted to preserve its
appearance exactly as in its original context. Depending on the kind of investigation
you intended to make one or other of these would be far more suitable than the other.
For example, if I'm studying the writer's lexicon or syntax in some quantitative way,
then I want plain text that I can analyse with various tools. If I'm studying the author's
awareness of the audience in some qualitative way, then I will want to see how the
text was presented to that audience originally.
Texts from TV can be saved to various media, from VHS or DVD formats, to hard
disk storage. Radio programmes can be saved in the same way, from satellite
broadcasts, or converted to computer data files in formats like mp3 and Real Audio,
using appropriate software. Alternatively, you can use broadcasts that are already
saved and made available for use in this form. The BBC has begun to do this
experimentally with some radio programmes available in mp3 format, while Teachers'
TV has a range of short programmes for users to download. In each case, you will
find the files on the Web sites at http://www.bbc.co.uk and http://www.teachers.tv. If
you search the World Wide Web, you will find more such recorded programmes that
you can download.
It is possible to obtain text messages in a similar way, if you use Internet technologies
to send or read them - a service that some networks or third parties provide. But if you
send and read them using a mobile phone only, then you may need to transcribe them
as a text or word-processor document. You should


Make an exact copy of all of the characters, including spaces, in each message.
Record information about
o
o
o
o

when it was sent,
from whom to whom,
where each was, and
the age and sex of the sender and recipient.
Include where possible the previous (initiating) and subsequent (responding)
messages, if there are either of these.
Please note that while you would hold this information in a database or text
document, you should have obtained the permission of the people concerned to do
this, and would not pass on this information in unethical ways. (In an investigation
you might refer to the sex or age of the sender or recipient, if this is relevant to your
28
research; you would never identify either by name, but might use convenient initials.)
There is more guidance on ethics below.
Sharing the texts
Once you have a collection of documents as computer data files, then it is easy to
share them with other people, and make larger collections. Copyright laws may limit
the extent to which you can do this, and will normally prevent you from publishing
your collection on a Web site. Of course, where the texts come from you and your
friends (e-mail messages and texts, say), then you can share them as widely as you
have all agreed to do.
There may be some situations where you are unable to use computer technologies to
study the texts, and where you resort to printing them onto paper. Some teachers may
still rely on doing this and photocopying the printouts, but it is better (for interacting
with the texts and for the environment) to do as much as possible in digital form such as adding annotations, comments or highlighting.
Using the texts
While it is possible to obtain (for free) some simple tools for analysing electronic
texts, you can make a start by using some of the features of a word processor.
Take the example of a collection of transcribed text messages, using Microsoft Word.
(Other word processors may have similar tools.)
If these are already saved in a single document, that is fine. You need to delete any of
the contextual information (and initiating and responding messages, if you do not
need these). Ideally, so as not to lose the information you have deleted, save the
resulting document with a new name.
If they are not saved as a single document, copy the individual messages (without any
of the other information) so that each is in a separate paragraph.
Now you can use either the Word Count option on the Tools menu or the Properties
option on the File menu. Either will show you the total numbers of pages, paragraphs,
lines, words and characters (with and without spaces) in your document.
Using a calculator or spreadsheet, you can now keep statistical records and perform
calculations, such as the mean number of characters per paragraph.
You can also use the Replace tool (on the Edit menu in MS Word) to replace a given
character or text string, note the number of replacements shown, then undo the action.
In this way you can calculate the frequency with which the various message writers
use any lexeme.
With spell checking and grammar checking you can identify and compute the
frequency of use of non-standard forms.
29
In MS Word, you can also set the spelling and grammar checker to show readability
statistics. (To do this, go to the Tools menu, select Options, then choose the Spelling
and Grammar tab, and make sure the box marked "Show readability statistics" is
checked.) The software uses the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade
Level scores, as explained here.
Flesch Reading Ease score
This rates text on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is for the reader
to understand the document. The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease score is:
206.835 - (1.015 x ASL) - (84.6 x ASW)
where:
ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of
sentences)
ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the
number of words)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score
This rates text on a U.S. grade-school level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an
eighth grader can understand the document. The formula for the Flesch-Kincaid
Grade Level score is:
(.39 x ASL) + (11.8 x ASW) - 15.59
where:
ASL = average sentence length (the number of words divided by the number of
sentences)
ASW = average number of syllables per word (the number of syllables divided by the
number of words)
Guidance on ethics
Permission to use language data - example letter of request
In studying language and technology, you will normally wish to investigate ICT texts
from a range of sources, including private individuals, such as your family, friends
and students or teachers from your school or college. Sometimes this may seem
intrusive, and it is important to respect other people, rather than see them as only a
source of data. In general, you should obtain permission in advance to use these texts.
And let people know what use you will, and will not, make of any data.
Having said that, many people (your friends and acquaintances) may readily give
specific or general permission for you to use texts that they have written - such as e30
mail messages, mobile phone texts, text chat from instant messenger conversations,
postings on message boards, and Web logs.
If you are a student, you may wish to use these in relatively closed context - for your
individual study of the texts, or a shared activity in a classroom. A teacher may wish
to share them more widely, for example with other teachers, to build up a more
extensive collection. It may be sensible, therefore, to get the explicit permission of the
"owners", for any uses you may wish later to make. (Conversely, it is very frustrating
to find yourself later unable to use data that you have painstakingly collected, because
you omitted to get this permission.)
Where you use such texts in any public context, then in most cases you should remove
anything in the data that might identify any individual exactly. It's not acceptable to
assume that you can take liberties because you know the person from whom you have
acquired language data. You may wish to use the specimen permission form below.
(Adapt it as necessary.)
Permission to use language data - example letter of request
To Whom It May Concern:
As part of my Advanced Level work in English Language, I am required to find real
language data, and interpret them according to theoretical models of language.
As you have kindly supplied, or agreed to supply, such data, I need your consent for
the use I will make of them. This letter explains what will happen to the data you have
provided, and has a space for you to show your agreement to this. If you have any
further questions about the Language Investigation, please contact the supervising
teacher or head of department at my school.
I may use computer application software to transcribe, save or adapt the data that you
have provided. The data you have supplied will normally be seen by the teachers
supervising my work, and may be seen by other teachers running the Advanced Level
course, as well as by moderators (examiners) of coursework who assess the work of
candidates at my school.
If my teachers or I wish to place the investigation in the public domain (by print,
broadcast or Web publishing) they or I will seek your permission. If you give
permission, the publication of your data will conform to normal ethical procedures for
scientific research - your names will be shown only as initials, and other identifying
information will not appear. Please show your consent to my use of the data you have
supplied by signing the form below.
Thank you for your help,
Student Investigator (Print name and sign)
Supervising Teacher (Print name and sign)
31
I have read the information about the use that will be made of language data
that I have supplied. I am the person legally entitled to give permission to use
these data, which were originally written or spoken by me or by a child of
whom I am the parent or legal guardian, and on whose behalf I can give such
permission. I agree to allow you to use the data I have provided. You may use
these data only in the way you have described. If you wish to publish the data,
you will seek my further permission for this.
Signed:
Print name:
Date:
Considering the authors and the audiences
In this guide, ICT texts are categorized by the technologies that are used to produce
and experience them - telephony, radio and TV, and Internet technologies. We can,
however, also usefully consider them in terms of number - is there one author or
more, and is the audience an individual or a larger group? A second dimension would
be the degree to which the contexts of utterance and reception are private or public.
Let's explain each of these ideas further.
A well-known 1990s commercial for a UK mobile phone company asked the question
"Who would you like to have a one-to-one with?" Some kinds of ICT text are very
clearly communications between two individuals (dyadic communications). When the
participants are aware of each other as individuals, then this influences the way they
speak, text or write. Examples would be



telephone or instant messenger conversations,
a series of text messages, or
an e-mail correspondence.
ICT texts may also come from one-to-many interactions, as happens when I




send an e-mail to a group of people,
post on a message board,
publish a document on the World-Wide Web, or
send a text message to a service that displays my message on a TV channel.
Where there are multiple authors, we can also see the interactions as being many to
many, as happens when a number of people



post on a message board, to join in a discussion,
call a radio or TV phone-in programme, or
take part in a telephone or instant messenger conference.
32
In a way one-to-many and many-to-many interactions may overlap. The difference
may lie with the author in the degree to which he or she feels a sense of being one
among many speakers or message-posters, or is unaware of the others who contribute.
We can think, too, of situations where two people speak to each other, but in the
context of a radio or TV broadcast with a huge unseen external audience.
The degree to which an ICT text is private or public is related to these questions, but
has some further dimensions. A one-to-one conversation may be typically private, but
this can change when, for example:




one of the participants reports it to other people;
recording technology leads to the production of a transcript;
one speaker is (or both are) in a place where others can hear him or her (on a
train, say);
a supervisor reads an e-mail exchange, looking for inappropriate use.
You can also see that in any of these cases, the degree to which any one person is
aware of the privacy or openness of the communication varies. There are people who
will speak on a train without making any concession to the presence of other people,
while others will moderate their speech in all sorts of ways because the situation
constrains or inhibits them in some way.
In studying ICT texts, you should certainly consider these distinctions - which belong
in the broader area of pragmatics. You should focus, especially, on the ways in which
the technology has an influence on how they work. Sometimes this leads to quite
novel kinds of interaction, as when someone sends a text message, knowing it will be
displayed on a TV broadcast, where a wide audience sees it, some of whom may in
turn respond, so that their replies are also displayed on the TV broadcast.
Investigations
In any area of language study, it is often helpful to supplement what you read about
other people's research by making your own investigations. This is a good idea
because language in use changes over time and is influenced by many social and
cultural factors, so that the findings of a particular piece of research may be valid for
the place and time where it happened, but may not be as widely (or universally true)
as is claimed. To give a simple example, anyone who watches and listens to the
BBC's football programmes Match of the Day and Match of the Day Live will hear
men speaking in ways that are supposedly more characteristic of women (turn-taking,
supportive overlapping, positive feedback).
In the case of ICT texts it is especially important for obvious reasons. The novelty of
these forms of language production means that any research into it is necessarily
limited - it will be recent, perhaps not widely published, and will not have had much
time to be tested by other views, so that a consensus can emerge.
Even where the research is good, it may need to be repeated frequently, because the
uses of new technologies are themselves changing rapidly - so that, for example, the
conventions that might characterize, say, the use of electronic mail for business
communications have changed equally rapidly. (Because of spam, it is less efficient;
33
the users are now more aware that it can be read by others for whom it was not
intended - which may be anything from malicious forwarding to industrial espionage;
a technologically sophisticated user may send only as plain text, because he or she
knows that many mail browsers will not display rich text or HTML correctly, and so
on).
This means that your own research may be the best that is available - perhaps because
it is done well, or perhaps because it is the only research that is available or that is
relevant to the area of theory about which you wish to have objective information.
Interactive texts
Some kinds of digital text are described as interactive. This is, strictly, incorrect. No
text, in isolation, can be interactive - interactions occur in the relationship of a text to
its author and audience*. And when people are involved, any text can be used
interactively - we can take a handwritten or print text (whether it's a poem or a piece
of junk mail) and read it aloud, write a review, plagiarize it for some other text and so
on.
*One might quibble with this and say that there is one way in which a digital
document can be interactive without human agency, since a search engine robot (also
known as a spider or crawler) can perform an automatic cataloguing of the content of
documents on a Web site, and send the results to the search engine database.
However, this task has no value until a human being performs a search that uses the
information that the robot has sent back to the database.
Many of the interactions that may happen between a text and its audience will not be
affected by the technology used to produce it. If we want to perform a scene from a
play, we can use a printed copy of the script, or find a digital version, and use this to
learn our lines. (In the case of a play, one might begin to perform with a printed
version of one's lines and cues, but would be less likely to use a computer for this though perhaps a handheld device or personal digital assistant would serve this
purpose.) But there are some kinds of interaction that are specific to digital texts.
These may be


things that we cannot do with print or written texts, or
things that we can do more powerfully, swiftly and accurately by using
technology.
As an example of the first, we can publish the text to an unlimited number of readers
at no extra cost, whereas printed or written documents require more material and
labour to produce multiple copies.
In the second case, there are many things that we can do with conventional print texts,
but which are so time-consuming and subject to the possibility of error, that we would
not do them at all, or would do them, if we really needed to, very slowly. But we can
do them easily and conveniently with suitable computer applications. Examples
would be

counting all the occurrences of a given lexical item in a text;
34




using analytical tools to calculate the readability score or fog index of a large
text;
changing the format of presentation of a long literary work;
copying long passages of a text for purposes of scholarship or plagiarism;
collaborating in a distributed group to produce a document with multiple
authors.
There are some kinds of interaction that are more convenient using print texts. One
can obtain the text of a novel as a digital document, and read it on a personal
computer's display device. But most readers will find it easier to use a printed version
in book format.
The author of a digital document can also use some kinds of software to prevent
interaction. If you prepare documents in some word-processor or portable document
format writer software, you can fix the text so that the end user cannot copy it, replace
it or save the document under a different name, for the purposes of editing it.
However, readers with sensory impairment or some kinds of learning difficulty may
be able to read the novel more easily in the digital format, since this allows the use of
text-to-speech software and other reader devices. We can also use computer software
to increase the size of the text as it is displayed (as the writer of this guide did in
writing it, to overcome the effects of a temporary visual impairment).
Social functions of technological media
Use of computers for social interaction | Cyberspace as a social context
Use of computers for social interaction
Some people may regard interactions conducted in cyberspace as not social by
definition. They challenge our understanding of the qualifier "social", because
traditional social activities require people to be physically together. But personal
relationships in an abstract sense, and intellectual exchanges can and do proliferate.
This is found chiefly in the use of distributed networks (internal networks[Intranets]
or the external Internet: Inter- here is short for "international" not "internal"). Visits to
Web sites allow for limited interaction, but mostly this is a new form of reading, with
little scope for response. More significant is chat. This is a metaphor from speech, but
the interaction is conducted in writing (typing). As in spoken conversation, there is
turn taking and contributions may be short. As in social conversation, standard forms
are not essential - phrases replace sentences, there is no spell checking, punctuation
may be "creative" and emoticons may appear. Some software allows the "chatters" to
insert images, known as avatars, to represent themselves in the "conversation". These
characters are conventional representations by sex, dress and age. Millions of such
interactions take place daily, often bringing strangers together.
Cyberspace as a social context
Like other social contexts, cyberspace has protocols and etiquette. For Internet
technologies, this is usually called Netiquette. It is easy for a novice to send a mail
message to millions of other users, or to ask a question to which the reply is already
well known among other users of a service. So there are rules, and names for
35
disapproved practices. Mail sent out en masse (electronic "junk mail") is called spam
(the word is also used as a verb). Sending repeated severe verbal rebukes to those who
breach Netiquette is flaming. Postal addresses are rarely exchanged (no need) and
many users do not reveal their sex, or even, sometimes, their personal names - the email address is an alias. Since each user may be at home, each may feel some
intimacy in the interaction. Cost is minimal (compared to telephone calls) and while
the exchange may be swifter than "snail mail" (conventional postal letters) there is
enough time delay for responses to be composed. On Home Truths (BBC Radio 4, Jan
2nd, 1999) John Peel interviewed a young (British) man who claimed to have a cyber
girlfriend. He was in Wales; she was in Central America. They exchanged messages
by electronic chat and e-mail (and sometimes by telephone). They had no immediate
plans to meet physically. This may be strange and unrepresentative of anything - or it
may be a glimpse of the future!
Representation of technology and language
Computer users as a group - cyber culture | Social attitudes to computer users
Computer users as a group - cyber culture
Traditional groups, which are significant for language change, use or interaction, were
necessarily located in a common place (region or locale) or class or peer groups.
Computer users can meet without being physically close, or even aware of the
location of other users. But they are identifiable as a group in their language use, in
terms of lexical choice, language fashions and conventions and awareness of
language.
Younger users of Internet communications are serious multitaskers. Naomi Baron's
2003 study quoted above found that:
...70 percent of college students who answered a questionnaire as part of
the study said they were simultaneously pursuing other activities while
they IM'd [used Instant Messaging], such as listening to a media player,
word processing, talking to someone in person, eating or drinking,
watching television or talking on the telephone. The average number of
IM conversations per student at one time was about three, the highest
number being 12. They had multiple conversations, they said, because
of time constraints, and also because focusing on just one IM
conversation would be "too weird."
Social attitudes to computer users
Where pejorative language use is disapproved in respect to gender or race, it persists
in relation to computer users - as in terms such as nerd or geek. The former originally
denoted someone lacking social poise, but has developed so that it now implies
industry and intelligence, while the original denotation remains but in a weaker form.
Pejorative language about race once reflected the speaker's or writer's fear of the
unknown or exotic. Pejorative language use about computer users may well express a
similar fear (and so tell us more about the speakers or writers than the person to whom
36
these refer). A more ambiguous attitude appears in the noun hacker (which has
connotations of daring, stealth and cunning). More approving is the metaphor guru (as
in "Web guru Jakob Nielsen"), which likens technical understanding to religious
enlightenment and wisdom.
Technology and the lexicon
Lexical growth and change - what's it all about? | Tracking new lexemes | Where do
new words come from? | How are new words formed?
"My guide is not a frequency guide, accordingly, but an illustration of the sort of thing
that is currently happening 'out there'. As is typical of slang, several of the words have
varying usage, and their meanings are prone to change with fashion. Some of the
usages I am recording may die out in due course, but others may grow in popularity,
and may eventually enter the standard language. It is never possible to predict the
future, with language change." David Crystal (2003), Introduction to A Glossary of
Netspeak and Textspeak, ISBN 0-7486-1982-8
Lexical growth and change - what's it all about?
Information and communications technologies have been the source of explosive
lexical growth. It is so prolific that it is almost impossible to explain. But let's try.
Technology has both an inward facing and an outward facing influence on lexical
growth. That is


while it promotes the emergence of new words and phrases to describe itself,
it also acts as the carrier for general language developments, so that new or
fashionable lexis from anywhere can reach a global audience in days.
More than that, it serves as a kind of incubator for new language forms (usually not
about technology) that will later pass into wider use.
If we look at some of the text on the interface of a computer application or in the user
manual for a mobile phone, we will find examples of new words and phrases (often
these are existing forms for which we have developed new meanings). But that is
perhaps less significant than the way in which these new words pass into the language
generally - as when biologists say that certain mental processes are "hard-wired".
Much of the lexis of technology has come the other way first, in the case of terms like


file, edit, view, format and window (all from the menu bar of my word
processor), and
register, display, menu, tones, messenger and assistant (all from my mobile
phone handbook).
There are many glossaries and dictionaries that record the lexis of particular
technologies - which can serve as primers for novices or reference guides for experts.
But arguably more important is the appearance of some of these new words and
phrases in general English dictionaries. This should indicate that they have been
37
captured or observed in the wild, so to speak. If you keep your ears and eyes open,
you will notice this kind of thing:
"Until recently there was a sort of firewall in people's minds…" (Simon Anholt,
author of Brand America, explaining how people may disapprove of the USA but still
buy its brands, BBC Radio FiveLive, Sunday 31st October 2004)
Now it's true that a firewall was a physical device to keep real fires from spreading
before the name passed on to security devices to keep malicious intruders outside of
computer networks, while allowing legitimate communications to pass through it. But
now this second use is far more common (a search on Google for "firewall +
computer" yields over 5 million hits, while "firewall + fire engine" gets 239,000), and
it seems unlikely that Mr. Anholt was thinking of the older kind of firewall when he
made his comment in a radio interview - certainly the digital network firewall
provides a closer analogy to the selective mental process of consumers which he
illustrated by this metaphor.
Tracking new lexemes
There are different ways in which we can do this. One is by observation in use, while
another is by use of reference works (such as dictionaries, glossaries and
encyclopaedias, which are usually compiled from other people's observations of
lexemes in use).
The second method allows systematic tracking of lexemes, to see whether they have
passed from specialist to more general use. You could, for example, find a technical
glossary from an earlier period, and compare it with what is recorded in contemporary
glossaries and dictionaries. The following lexemes appear in a glossary from 1991
("A straightforward path through the jargon jungle", PC Answers, Volume 1, July
1991, Future Publishing, Bath, UK):
ASCII, BASIC, binary, bit, bus, byte, comms, CAD, CD-ROM, character, daisywheel,
data, disk, drive, file, font, hard disk, hexadecimal, mail merge, MIDI, modem, mouse,
multitasking, parallel port, peripheral (noun), printer, RAM, ROM, serial port,
spreadsheet, word processor
Here is a selection from David Crystal's An A-Z of Netspeak (from his 2004 A
Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN
0-7486-1982-8):
access (verb), ADSL, applet, ASCII, attachment, avatar, backup, binary code, bit,
byte, blog, bookmark, broadband, byte, character, chat (-group, -room), client/server,
cookie, crash, DNS, download, electronic mail (email, e-mail), emoticon, encryption,
FAQ, firewall, firmware, flame, geek, GPS, guest, hack, host, HTML, HTTP,
hypertext, icon, instant message (IM), Internet protocol (IP), LAN, LCD, link, logon,
menu, MIDI, modem, multimedia, multitasking, netiquette, network, offline, palmtop,
PC, PDA, ping, protocol, RAM, ROM, scanner, search engine, server, SMS, spam,
spider, texting, URL, upload, WAN, World Wide Web (WWW), wi-fi, XML
38
You can easily compare these to see which lexemes appear in both - if nothing else
this suggests that they have remained in use for over a decade. But you can make a
more powerful and useful comparison by looking for the lexemes (from either list or
both) in a general dictionary, such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English or the Compact Oxford English Dictionary Online
(http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries). You can show the results of such
comparisons in a table or Venn diagram. Here is an example, which you can expand
or adapt to include other lexemes (you may wish to add a brief gloss of each entry).
"Yes" or "No" indicates whether the lexeme appears in each case.
Lexeme
PC Answers 1991
Crystal 2004
Longman 2004
Compact Oxford 2005
ASCII
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
bit, byte
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
bus
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-No-
character
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
-No-
comms
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-No-
drive
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-No-
mail merge
-Yes-
-No-
-No-
-No-
MIDI
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
mouse
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-Yes-
multitasking
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
-Yes-
peripheral
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-Yes-
spreadsheet
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-Yes-
word processor
-Yes-
-No-
-Yes-
-Yes-
While this shows that the special lexis is being recorded more widely, most of these
lexemes are listed by the dictionary as having a technical sense, or one related to
computing - they are passing into wider use only because more people are using
computer technologies at work and at home.
An exception to this would be multitasking, which has extended its meaning from the
context of computing to general human activities. When people suggest that women
are better than men at multitasking, they very rarely mean that they are better at
running many computer applications simultaneously. In relation to teenagers,
multitasking does often refer to the simultaneous use of technologies, but not
specifically computer applications. Thus, my daughter multitasks by chatting with the
MSN instant messenger (in several sessions at once), browsing some digital
photographs, watching TV and sending and receiving text messages by mobile phone.
We can see how established or common lexis is adapted to a new, more restricted,
meaning with bus. This derives, metaphorically, from the vehicle that takes people to
and from various places. It denotes, in computing, an electronic circuit that transports
data between different parts of a system, and connected devices. The lexeme has now
been extended into the acronym USB ("universal serial bus") - a standard connection
technology for personal computers and peripheral devices.
39
We can also see change occurring with port. This was originally used to denote a
physical connection (as in the serial and parallel or Centronics ports on early PCs).
Now it usually denotes a digital or logical connection - so the Internet Protocol uses a
very large number of ports for different tasks (this makes it possible for system
designers to regulate use). It is derived, of course, from the old meaning of port as a
place to and from which ships sail.
Where do new words come from?
Tim Shortis, summarizing a chapter of his book, The Language of ICT, writes that:
"From the social perspective, vocabulary will emerge out of particular contexts of
relationships, intentions, communities and power. Considering word origins and how
words come into the language can be a productive way of seeing this social dimension
and the ways in which new words reflect and define how people are thinking and
relating to each other, as well as to the technology being used." http://www.nettingit.com
In one sense, this has always been true. But new technologies can provide a means for
new kinds of distributed community to emerge and a means for existing or emerging
communities to become more confident. For example, people who love poodles may
not live close enough together to form anything like an interest group with face-toface meetings. But there are enough poodle lovers in the world for them to form a
digital group. (Search on http://www.google.com for "poodle lovers groups message
boards" and you will find several.) You will also find many groups with more serious
agendas both benevolent and anti-social.
Because these communities are distributed, across continents or the whole world, their
usages can spread into mainstream language varieties more swiftly.
How are new words formed?
Lexical growth - neologisms | Lexical growth - new meanings for established terms |
Morphology
New technologies connect so thoroughly with the wider society that uses them, that
language growth in relation to them does not differ markedly from what happens in
the language generally: there are some wholly new words, there are many more
borrowings and adaptations of older words, and there are patterns of morphology
whereby roots and affixes are used to build new forms from old elements, or where
longer forms are abbreviated or reduced to acronyms. Tim Shortis states that:
"Linguists have developed a taxonomy or system for classifying types of word
formation and the volume of new technical words coming into the language is an
opportunity to see these classifications in action; it is also possible that there are some
interesting differences in patterns of some of these new words." http://www.nettingit.com
Here are just a few examples.
Lexical growth - neologisms
40
This is fairly easy to study. These are words or phrases coined to denote new
processes and activities, products or technologies. These are often acronyms (formed
by initials) like:





BIOS (basic input output system),
CPU (central processing unit),
DSL (digital subscriber line),
RAM (random access memory) or
URL (uniform [or unique] resource locator).
Some others are portmanteau words, such as



bit
emoticon
modem
Lexical growth - new meanings for established terms
This is a far more prolific area of lexical growth. Some examples are now almost
universally known in developed societies, such as icon or mouse (sometimes jokingly
called a rodent). Windows and desktop are metaphorical names for parts of the
interface. A cache is a temporary store (in memory, which also has a new
metaphorical meaning). Many of these metaphors are derived from resemblance to



human activities (memory, client-server, file, folder, utility);
traditional communications (packet, mail, router, bus), and even,
food and drink, in Java (a programming language; the name is US slang for
coffee), cookies (files which exchange information about the user with Web
sites) and spam (unsolicited e-mail).
Arguably the most apt metaphor is in the name of the World Wide Web. Search
engines gather information about resources by sending out programs that record
document information and return it to the search site's database: these programs are
called robots, crawlers or spiders. The last of these is a punning reference to the name
of the Web.
Morphology
Compounding abounds. The affix -ware (as in software) has spawned many new
terms in computing, such as authorware, firmware, freeware, groupware, malware
and shareware: the basic morphology is verb or noun + suffix. The portmanteau
words are formed by compounding, with abbreviation of one or more elements as in



bit (binary + digit)
modem (modulator + demodulator) and
emoticon (emotion + icon).
Technology and grammar - the grammar of computer languages
41
Programming or Operating System (OS) languages are artificial (invented) languages.
They may use characters other than those on conventional keyboards. They will have
rules or conventions for writing, and none is a spoken language. However, many
resemble natural forms of English (for example Microsoft's DOS, which has
commands like type, abort or copy). HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) works
like ordinary typed English with two fundamental differences. The software that uses
it ignores any spaces in a file. And any instructions, such as making text bold or
drawing a table, are shown by tags. These are pairs of angle brackets, giving an
instruction (e.g. <b> = make text bold) or reversing it (e.g. </b> = turn off bold text).
The only difference in the form of these two instructions is the slash character. HTML
has its own syntax and (flexible) semantics.
Computer software as a language authority
This is already a reality. Proprietary software has spelling and grammar tools that are
hard to ignore. It uses established lexicography in electronic form. The grammar
checking is not yet able to recognize complex standard syntax, but spell checking is
more secure. Where earlier software applications used primarily US English spelling,
some now allow great variety - which perhaps reduces its tendency to support the
emergence of a global or international standard spelling system for English. This
seems not to be an altruistic or principled development, so much as a response to the
consumer's demand to have regional spelling - as with UK users of word-processors
disapproving of the spell-checkers' use of US forms. (In spite of which many British
users do not know that they can set the UK spelling as the default, and complain that
their software is "American", whereas they have not discovered how to make it
"British"…)
Telephony
How we use telephones
Do you find yourself, or have you observed other people, doing any of these things
while speaking on the telephone?



Making gestures, even though the other participant in a conversation cannot
see these;
changing one's accent, as compared with face-to-face conversation (for
example accommodating the other person's accent more markedly);
experiencing greater (or reduced) self-consciousness or embarrassment,
compared to face-to-face communication.
The telephone excludes the use of visual cues and gestures. It also gives an acoustic
representation of speech that is less rich than the original spoken sounds. And until
recent times the cost of calls encouraged many users of telephones to attempt to
communicate more swiftly than in everyday speech. (This may explain why parents or
grandparents feel unease at, and sometimes express criticism of, younger people's
tendency to use telephones without much regard for the time.)
Telephone communication using landlines has also, until recently, been inhibited by
the restricted availability of the system. Typically, a domestic user would have one
42
line (or two, at most) so that anyone's using it for long periods would prevent any
other calls from arriving. Now there are systems to alert users to incoming calls ("call
waiting") while use of mobile phones means that the technology is not restricted in
this way. (Though mature users may retain the attitudes that were appropriate to the
older, restricted, systems.)
A dyadic medium
How far is it true? | What is the reason for this?
For some time now, it has been technically possible to use a telephone for a
conference call, where three or more people take part in a conversation
simultaneously. It is more difficult to initiate than a simple one-to-one call, but less
complex than many other procedures that people routinely undertake with telephones.
We can take, as a working hypothesis, the idea that there is something about voice
telephony that encourages one-to-one or dyadic interactions rather than group
communications - "two's company and three's a crowd". The reason for doing this
would be an impression, based on observation, but not in any systematic way, that, as
a proportion of telephone calls for various kinds of user, one-to-one conversations are
vastly more common than group interactions. Starting from this point, we can do
various things to find out if it is true, and then to explain what we find.
How far is it true?
We can find this out by a number of methods. For example:



asking people to estimate what proportion of calls are one-to-one or group
conversations;
keeping a log of our own calls - and pooling the results for a group survey;
asking telephone companies for information about call types.
What is the reason for this?
This is harder to answer. Any reasons that you suggest will only be tentative and
provisional, though you may be able to devise research tasks to investigate further. It
may be that the action of initiating a call is something we identify with speaking to an
individual, but not in a group discussion. Possibly, it reflects a general preference for
speaking one-to-one that we are not able to sustain in other situations (at work, at
home, at leisure) because other people are visibly present - whereas the phone allows
us to indulge the preference without causing others to feel excluded (since they do not
know we are speaking to someone else). If that seems implausible, consider this: if all
your other contacts could know, every time you made a call, to whom it was made
and how long it lasted - might that cause you to change some of your practices in
using the telephone?
A democratic medium
43
The telephone began life as a technology that was to be used sparingly and for
relatively important communications - so that in the USA and Britain public telephone
kiosks allowed people to make free calls to the emergency services, while the first
people to have telephones in their homes included doctors, senior police officers and
sheriffs or magistrates.
As the technology has become less expensive and more convenient over time, it has
also become possible to see what might be the limits of its use. (When cost and
convenience cease to affect decisions as to use, then people will decide for other
reasons.) Here, too, you can see for yourself. Most modern systems (landline and
mobile) provide the user (when they send the bill) with extensive information about
the number and duration of calls, where the other person was and so on. It is easy,
from such records, to show which were social calls, which related to work, to
consumer affairs, personal finance and so on.
It is less easy with landlines to keep a record of incoming calls - so here one might
wish to keep a log to get an objective picture of what is happening.
We might assume that people use telephony extensively merely because it is so
inexpensive - because it is there, so to speak. The vast popularity and use of the
technology are self-evident, but do we really have much idea of what it is doing? How
many of those calls are giving important information and how many are young men
sending jokes or insults to friends? How many are bonding sessions and how many
are children asking a parent for a lift after music practice?
Almost certainly there are market research companies that have made surveys of this.
But you may not be able to share their findings, without difficulty, or very good
contacts. You can, however, carry out your own surveys or keep your own logs, for
pooling with members of a group.
You could do this using spreadsheet or simple database software - recording
information in a number of fields, such as




the category of call and recipient
the time of day when it was made
the duration of the call
the cost (if known), and so on.
It is better to have many fields of information (and disregard them for particular
interpretations), so long as there are not so many as to make it onerous to keep the
records or logs.
Telephone conversations by landline and mobile
How the medium affects the message | Pragmatics | Grammar | Discourse features |
Phonology | Is language use with this technology changing over time?
How the medium affects the message
Pragmatics
44
People who use voice telephony normally cannot see each other. (There are
increasingly exceptions to this where people use telephones to speak, say, in an openplan office or mobile phones in a restaurant or bar, where they can see each other.)
This means that much of the non-verbal communication is lost. (The speakers may
well continue to use gestures - as the writer of this guide does - but the other person
cannot see these, in either case.)
In studying telephone conversations, you might consider whether a pragmatic analysis
suggests that speakers do things differently from their practice in face to face
conversations - do they observe the conversational maxims listed by Paul Grice, or do
they employ face and politeness strategies to a greater degree than when the parties
can see each other?
Do speakers have shared knowledge, and does one assume the other shares his or her
knowledge, so that they refer to things elliptically? Do specific conversations allude
to other conversations or events or the common culture of the speakers?
In exploring how the technology may influence language as it mediates conversation,
then pragmatic analysis is likely to be a fruitful area of study. In commenting on texts
you are seeing for the first time, you will need to make use of some pragmatic
concepts, as in this example, from Adrian Attwood:
"We know from the question that Text F is a sales script. The pragmatic consideration
of this text makes us look for features, which are designed to reassure the potential
customer rather than to inform them. Particularly, in this case, where the script is for a
telephone conversation and one of the objects from the sales-person's viewpoint is to
keep the other person talking. This means that the text will try to close off as many
potential exits as possible and therefore be similar to some of the normal co-operative
principles of spoken language."
Grammar
Do people generally vary their grammatical usage in spoken English, when they speak
on the telephone, as compared to face-to-face speaking? It is possible that use of the
technology might alter one's sense of formality, and attentiveness to supposed
"correct" forms.
For most people there is considerable difference between the grammar of their writing
and their speaking. Compared to this the difference between the grammar used in
speaking in different situations, with or without the use of any communication
technology may be less evident.
Discourse features
Voice telephony has produced some conventions that help us construct a discourse, in
terms of beginning, middle and end. These often give information that is redundant
for users of newer forms of telephony (such as answering a call by stating one's phone
number). But they may survive as a kind of traditional courtesy.
45
It is fairly easy to gather evidence about this, either by asking people to say what they
typically do, or by keeping a log of what they do, when you call them. You might
consider questions such as the following, to organize what you find.







Does the person who receives the call always speak first?
How does the person who receives a call reply? Does he or she give a number,
utter a greeting, or do something else?
Does the person making the call explain in summary form the reason for
calling?
While one person is speaking, does the other listen silently or give positive
feedback and supportive overlapping (things like "mmm" and "yes")?
Does the person who made the call or the one who receives it usually bring the
conversation to an end?
What conventional expressions do we use to close the conversation?
How long is the series of interactions that marks the ending of the talk, before
one or other puts down the telephone?
By studying lots of real conversations, you will quickly add to this list. By pooling
your findings with others, you may develop a very useful survey of conventions of
telephone conversations. If you also log the age and sex of the speaker, and whether
the conversation used landlines only, mobiles only or landline to mobile - these
details, too, may help you see some patterns emerging.
Phonology
Do we use different speech sounds when we use certain technologies? Can we
account for what we find in answering this question? (For example, does the general
tendency towards accommodation become stronger when we use a telephone?)



Does technology influence such things as suprasegmental features of speech?
Are we more or less comfortable with pauses and silence than in face-to-face
conversation?
Do we try to fill silences or even ask the other person questions about them?
("Are you still there/all right?")
Is language use with this technology changing over time?


If people use telephones increasingly, and if the technology becomes ever less
conspicuous, then our capacity to use the phone un-self-consciously for social
intercourse could also be expected to grow.
But a contrary influence comes from the uses of telephony in business where
many organizations teach both general points of etiquette and even very
specific routines (or scripts) for their employees to use when making calls.
Organizations such as call centres will enforce these conventions by
monitoring the calls (and disciplining those who deviate from the script). They
are usually required to notify the person receiving the call that this is
happening - commonly the caller will say that the call is being monitored "for
training purposes".
46
Interaction by text messaging
What is text messaging? | Popular ideas about text messaging | How the medium
affects the message
What is text messaging?
Text messaging most commonly refers to the practice of composing and sending
messages with mobile phones. These are usually limited (though this may not remain
the case) to 160 characters in length (including spaces, or 80 if non-Latin characters
are used). The message writer uses a small keypad, in which each key has multiple
values which the writer selects by repeated pressing of the relevant key until the
character required appears. The characters include Arabic numerals, accented
characters (such as é) or letters from other alphabets (such as å, used in Norwegian)
and various punctuation marks and other symbols.
It is possible to use the same underlying technology to compose and send and
(perhaps less commonly and usefully) to receive such messages using a personal
computer. While few people would use this to send from one computer to another
(since e-mail is easier and less constrained) this is a very practical technology to use
when one person is using a personal computer with an Internet connection, and the
other person is using a mobile phone. This resembles loosely the situation where A (in
an office or at home) uses a landline to make a telephone call to the mobile phone of
B (who is travelling somewhere).
The outline history below may be useful in demonstrating the extent of the use of this
communication technology. There are now more mobile telephones registered in the
UK than there are people. Although young people have been quicker to take up the
technology, it has gradually been adopted by people of all ages, in a way that
resembles the growth of home personal computing.
A Brief History of UK Text
1992: The first UK text message was sent in December.
1995: SMS was launched commercially in the UK.
1998: UK Operators O2, Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile established an
interconnection.
1998: The first recorded monthly text message total was 5.4 million, in April.
2000: The first TV programme to use text messaging in a storyline was Eastenders.
2001: August was the first month in which over one billion messages were sent in the
UK.
2002: The first local/mayoral electoral vote by text message took place on 23rd May.
2002: In December 1 billion SMS messages per day were exchanged globally
2003: 78 million text messages were sent by Britons on Valentine's Day, 6 times more
47
than traditional cards and a 37% increase on text figures for 2002.
2003: A-Level results - 67 million text messages were sent throughout the UK on
August 14th.
2004: In December, 2.4 billion text messages were sent in Britain.
2004: A-Level results - 81 million messages were sent throughout the UK on August
19th.
2004: 53 million UK subscribers were registered as active on UK mobile phone
networks as of the end of September, of which over 70% send text messages.
2004: The Rt. Hon Tony Blair MP became the first UK Prime Minister to use text
message technology to talk directly to the people on 25th November, answering
questions submitted in advance by text message from members of the public as well
as in real-time in a mobile phone chat-room, transmitted live from No. 10 Downing
Street.
2005: On New Year's Day, the total number of text messages sent reached 133
million, the highest recorded daily total.
2005: 95% of 16-24 year olds used text messaging regularly, each sending an average
of 100 texts per month. The peak hours for texting were between 10.30 p.m. and
11.00 p.m.
Adapted from a guide at http://www.text.it
Popular ideas about text messaging
Popular ideas about text messaging often derive from a confusion of the technology
and its users. The mobile phone does not require the user to write in non-standard
forms, but the 160-character limit may encourage the development of an alternative
standard short form.
Thus, if a text message contains a non-standard form there are many possible
explanations:





The writer knows the standard form in ordinary written English but has
shortened it to allow for more words in the whole message.
The writer knows the standard form in ordinary written English but has
shortened it to save time in sending the message.
The writer knows the standard form in ordinary written English but has
changed it for idiosyncratic reasons (like thinking a different form to be
elegant or amusing).
The writer knows the standard form but has not entered it correctly nor noticed
the mistake.
The writer does not know the standard form.
Do not assume that the last explanation is always true, and be ready to challenge
commentators who make the same assumption.
48
Tim Shortis notes that newspaper articles and even books by linguists make mistaken
suggestions about the frequency of initialisms such as brb ("[I'll] be right back") and
emoticons or smileys (such as :) for happiness). (Emoticons are images composed of
punctuation marks, so-called because they express emotions. The name is a
portmanteau word formed from emot[ion] + icon.)
Positively, he claims that the language conventions are accessible - this is self-evident
from the rapidity with which they have become established and understood by a wide
population of users (both authors and audience). We can contrast this with the
resistance of largely the same user group to the learning of a second language. A
plausible explanation is that, whereas the text messager recognizes French as a quite
different language - foreign in every sense - he or she sees that texting is only an
extension or adaptation of his or her existing language competence.
This technology has been marketed at younger people for whom the relative
cheapness of the text message is attractive. Over time, by a natural process, users of
the technology become older. And one can predict - by analogy with personal
computers - that as the methods of entering text become more straightforward
(requiring less physical dexterity) then the technology will be used by older writers
(perhaps with more regard for the orthography of written Standard English, perhaps
not. Would the silver [senior] texter write before - as I do - or b4 as my daughter
does?)
How the medium affects the message
Pragmatics | Lexis and orthography | Grammar | Discourse
Pragmatics
Most of the comments above, about pragmatics in relation to voice telephony, apply
equally to text messaging. But does the fact that text messaging is not spoken make
any difference?
Whereas many highly developed forms of writing have conventions that distance
them from the immediacy of the spoken word, this is not true of all forms - as we see
from lyric poems that use colloquialisms, or poetic monologues. Chat rooms, instant
messaging and text messaging close that gap:


technically, the user is entering the text by means of a keyboard, keypad or
other input device;
linguistically, he or she is speaking silently rather than writing.
Can we find evidence to support this sweeping claim? Part of the answer lies in
pragmatics: we can examine text messages (or chat) to see how far the participants
follow conversational maxims or how far their messages can be explained by
politeness theory, for example.
Tim Shortis notes that text messaging is often explicitly related to face-to-face
conversation, commenting on past interactions or anticipating future ones. He
49
develops this with the idea that while fast, the interaction is "not in real time", which
leaves time for participants "to construct a considered response" between
"communication turns".
He also advances a theory of "disinhibition" - suggesting that text messaging frees the
participants from negative non-verbal communications. This might be difficult to
demonstrate by research, but could be tested by comparing the content of face-to-face
conversations with that of a series of messages. It is highly plausible in the context of
personal relationships, where a request for a date or an attempt at flirting could be
made with less immediate risk of losing face. (Against that is the risk that, unlike
spoken words, that are not recorded, a text message can be shown to other people.)
Lexis and orthography
In considering text messaging, you cannot readily separate these, since the novelty of
textspeak lexemes often lies both in the use of a given form to express a particular
meaning, and also in the way it is presented in terms of spelling. There are various
reasons for the use of non-standard forms:




abbreviating a standard form to allow for more words in the whole message or
to save time in sending the message;
knowing the standard form but changing it for idiosyncratic reasons (like
thinking a different form to be elegant or amusing);
knowing the standard form but entering it incorrectly through inattention or
clumsiness - this is especially easy where one has to scroll through options on
a keypad where each key has multiple values;
not knowing the standard form.
Beware of accepting the view (common in popular journalism, and among teachers)
that the non-standard form is evidence of the user's ignorance and laziness, and the
related idea that use of new technologies is the cause of this. (The reality is more
complex: more people are producing texts that others get to see; those texts are not
subject to the degree of editorial correction that was possible in the past; in spite of
some outraged protests, many people are happy to write things, and read those from
others, that have not had the attention of a proof-reader - generally we have deemed it
a price worth paying for a democratization of learning and knowledge.)
A common feature of text messaging (and of Internet chat) is standardized or
conventional abbreviations. How many of these do you recognize?
ASAP, AYOR, BRB, BTDT, BTW, b2b, B4N, CRBT
Click here to find glosses.
Many of the most common are acronyms or initialisms (to use a neologism). These
take the first letter of each word, or substitute a numeral. They are used in other
contexts (such as chat, instant messaging and informal e-mails). Here are some. Can
you think of others?

IMHO: in my humble opinion
50




JIC: just in case
LOL: lots of love
MMYT: mail me your thoughts
ROTFL[MAO]: rolling on the floor laughing [my ass off]
Some abbreviations are just that - they remove characters from the standard form as
far as possible, while leaving the original recognizable:




lch: lunch
mbrsd: embarrassed
pls: please
thx: thanks
Other features of text orthography are




initialising of some syllables or morphemes
contracting forms by removing noun characters
substituting consonants (x for sk, for example)
using homophone characters to represent meanings via the corresponding
speech sound
The last of these appears in modified acronyms. They use initials, or characters
(letters and numerals) that are homophones of complete words or morphemes (such as
2=to, 4=for, b=be, c=see). Here are some:



CUS: see you soon
F2F: face to face
OIC: Oh, I see
Many words or phrases are hybrids, using two or more of these features together:






2moro: tomorrow
cul8r: see you later
h2cus: hope to see you soon
ltsgt2gthr: let's get together
pls4givme: please forgive me
t2yl8r: talk to you later
One common feature of text messaging, and to some extent, of e-mail, is the use of
lower case where mixed case is standard in written and print texts. One can explain
this partly on grounds of convenience, turning over time, into habit. But there is also a
positive reason for the loss of this distinction. Teachers reinforce use of mixed case
with the claim that to ignore it will lead to loss of clarity of meaning. When people
see for themselves that this is not true - that the use of lower case does not obscure
meaning in almost every instance - then they may use lower case in a more assured
way.
51
In modern standard written English, the conventions of case are anyway not coherent
or logical. Apart from the initial capital at the start of a sentence, and capitals for
initials in acronyms, we normally use capitals for names and titles, and for adjectives
derived from these. This leads to some strange inconsistencies (For example: Queen
Elizabeth II is Her Majesty, the Queen, to her loyal subjects; but she is the queen who
succeeded George VI on the throne, and a queen regnant as opposed to her mother,
who was a queen consort.) The dropping of case distinctions in text messages does
not mean that the texter is unaware of such distinctions, nor that their use in formal
written texts is affected.
Grammar
In considering the grammar of text messages, you may like to consider the following
questions:



How varied are the clause and sentence structures?
How does that variety (or lack of variety) achieve particular effects?
How far does the grammar resemble that of speech rather than writing?
One might suppose that the 160-character limit would severely constrain the sender's
ability to achieve particular effects of style, and have a characteristic voice - but many
users of the technology will find ways to break out of the supposed constraints.
Discourse
If the 160-character limit constrains grammatical choices, one would suppose it to
constrain the structure of the entire message even more so. In studying real examples
of text messages, can you find any evidence of structural organization?



How many sentences (including minor sentences) does the message contain?
Of what types are they (statements, directives, questions and so on)?
How are they arranged?
Radio and TV
A demagogic and privileged medium
Where text messaging is a technology that promotes one-to-one communications,
broadcasting usually (as the name implies) is a one-to-many interaction. Over time,
this has changed - there are now broadcasts in which guests can speak live and
unrehearsed, as well as those where members of the audience can speak by phone or
send messages by e-mail (as well as writing letters, for less immediate kinds of
response).
Over time, too, broadcasting has become more specialized, developing ever more
services for increasingly fragmented or floating audiences. Where the BBC once had
the Home Service, the Light and Third programmes for radio listeners, it now has ten
national networks for radio, as well as 40 local radio services in England, and regional
services in the rest of Britain. There are many initiatives to increase the audience's
52
participation. In the case of BBC Radio FiveLive the broadcasting is, according to the
station controllers, meant to be a rolling conversation with the audience - who are
encouraged to call in during most parts of the schedule (the exception being the
broadcasts of live sports commentaries; but to redress the balance at weekends these
are followed by dedicated phone-in programmes for sports fans).
Radio and TV broadcasters, then, have moved from a model of speaking to a remote
and unseen audience, to one that allows far more audience response and participation
- but that evolution has limits. Many broadcasts are recorded before transmission. The
live broadcasts (of which there are far more on UK networks, many of which have no
recorded programmes) are still very much led by the presenters, who may sometimes
allow the guest who phones in to speak to the wider audience.
Sports commentary
How the medium affects the message | Pragmatics | Lexis | Grammar | Discourse
structure | Phonology
How the medium affects the message
Sports commentaries are a well-established form of broadcast. They are necessarily
spontaneous or instantaneous in some respects. For soccer commentaries on BBC
Radio FiveLive, there is a commentator (often two, who speak for half of each of the
game's two halves) and an expert summarizer. There is usually also an anchor person
in the national studio, while, on some match days, there will also be reporters and
commentators at other grounds. As well as these people, whom the audience hears,
there will be production and technical staff in attendance.
The challenge for the commentator is to tell the audience what is happening for all
periods of live action, to invite the summarizer to make further comments and
judgements during breaks in play and briefly during the play and to bring in reports
and score flashes from other grounds.
Let's look at a short passage of comment from a TV broadcast on Sky Sports of a
match between England and Belgium in October 1999. (Figures in brackets indicate
pauses in seconds). T is the commentator, Martin Tyler. G is the expert summarizer,
Andy Gray.
T: ...The delivery though comes from Dyer or he shaped for it (4) cleared by Van
Meir (5) Belgium were slow to push out that time (3) free-kick given against Shearer,
twenty-eight international goals now, as I say only five England players have ever
reached the thirty mark or more. Bobby Charlton leading the way forty-nine, Gary
Lineker forty-eight, Jimmy Greaves forty-four and two on thirty, Tom Finney and Nat
Lofthouse so er
G: Thirty goals is definitely gettable, whether he'll ever get in the top trio (3)
M: ...well he was asked that this week and of course it is rightly an ambition, but he's
got to maintain his position what for four or five years one would have thought,
Shearer. It's Phillips.
53
Pragmatics
The most obvious point about this broadcast is that it is constructed partly as a
conversation between the commentator and summarizer, separated by the (often
longer) passages of commentary - which is strictly narration for much of the game.
Generally the account of what happens on the pitch will be given without reference to
the audience in any explicit sense. The commentator will usually address them at the
start of the broadcast, with the formula: "Welcome to [name of ground] where
[description of the weather as it may affect the spectacle and the match]..." The
commentator may not address the audience directly again, though this commonly
happens when the match is very exciting or very dull (at which point, the
commentator will tell them that they are, or are not, missing an entertaining game).
This is less likely to happen during the live comment, as the commentator is
concentrating on the action - observing it in real time, and giving a running
description of it. This may require continuous adjustment, where the commentary
anticipates wrongly the outcome of an action. This can be comical, as in a 1973 match
between England and West Germany, whose captain, Günther Netzer, dominated a
one-sided contest that England lost 3-1. As Netzer struck a pass, the commentator,
David Coleman, declared: "And that's a brilliant pass". For once, though, Netzer had
hit the ball far too hard, and it ran into touch before the player for whom it was
intended could reach it. Instead of correcting his comment, Mr. Coleman went on:
"And it's so good, it's beaten the man."
In the example above, Martin Tyler makes an adjustment to his earlier comment as
"the delivery comes from Dyer" is modified to "he shaped for it". As Mr. Tyler sees
that the Belgian defender, Van Meir, will clear, or has already cleared, the ball, he
corrects his account of what was to happen, with a statement about what he thinks
Kieron Dyer attempted to do.
"Belgium were slow to push out that time" shows that Martin Tyler expects the
audience of fans to understand the implication of the remark. He expresses, with great
economy, the various related ideas that:






Football has an offside law (the details of which the audience also knows).
Defences can use the offside law to protect their goal.
They do this with the offside trap, whereby they take up positions where the
attacking forwards are onside, then run forward before the player on the ball
can make a pass, so that the attackers are now caught offside if he passes to
one of them.
The Belgian defenders know how to do this.
They did not do it on this occasion.
This was a fault (but England gained no advantage, since the defender cleared
the ball).
Lexis
54
A sports commentary will use the special lexis of the sport in question. In the case of
cricket, this would include things like the names of different bowling deliveries
(bouncer, full toss, googly, leg break, off break, Yorker) and the fielding positions
(covers, deep extra cover, fine leg, gully, silly mid-off, slips, third man). In the short
extract above the only examples of special lexis would be the very obvious goal, freekick and cleared (a common verb, but here used in a special football-related sense).
Sports commentaries also make extensive use of the names of the participants,
especially in team games. The players taking part in the game are referred to in the
commentary usually by last name only (Dyer, Shearer, Van Meir, Philips) - the
commentator may have given the full name at the start, but the audience is expected to
know them well enough anyway. We have the full names of the historical leading
goalscorers perhaps as a mark of respect, as well as to identify them. The use of the
names also has relevance to pragmatics since the audience knows not only that, say,
Philips is Kevin Philips but that in this match he is playing at his club ground (he was
a Sunderland player in 1999) and also that he is a forward, so that mention of his
name suggests where the action is happening on the pitch.
Grammar
The commentator and summarizer will often use elliptical forms and what David
Crystal calls minor sentences - where the audience is expected to take some things as
read. So "free kick given against Shearer" omits any articles ("a free kick") and
auxiliaries ("is" or "has been" before "given"). A typical ellipsis occurs with "It's
Philips" - we do not know from this what Kevin Philips is doing. Although this is a
TV broadcast, so we can see the play, we should note that at any time there will be
many players in view. "It's Philips" indicates either that this player has possession of
the ball, or that he is running into a space where the commentator expects him to
receive the ball imminently.
The commentator slips between present and past tense verb forms to create a
distinction between what is happening now, and what has just happened. Strictly, it's
all in the past - but Martin Tyler reserves the past tense for passages of play where
there is a definite outcome. When Kieron Dyer attempts a cross he uses present tense
"comes" but when Van Meir intercepts the ball, Martin Tyler uses "shaped" and
"cleared".
Discourse structure
Where some kinds of discourse can vary in length, according to the authors' wishes, a
sports commentary is quite clearly constrained by the event it shows to the audience.
With a football match this typically takes this pattern:




Opening titles.
Pre-match: build-up, interviews, player and team information, highlights from
recent games and so on.
First half: commentary (really narration) and expert summarizing (often
comment).
Half time: discussion of first half, analysis of important events, replay of
highlights.
55



Second half: commentary (really narration) and expert summarizing (often
comment).
Post-match: discussion of game, analysis of important events, replay of
highlights, discussion of implications for team, players and manager.
Closing titles and production credits.
The relevance of this to the extract is that the commentator cannot determine exactly
when to start and finish - he or she describes the live and recent action, while being
ready for the arrival of half time and full time, as indicated by the timing of the match
and the addition of extra time at the end of each half.
Phonology
The transcript gives no indication of the accents used by Martin Tyler or Andy Gray.
It does, though, give an indication of the pace of the commentary, and the frequency
and length of pauses. In this respect radio and TV broadcasts differ - in the latter case
it is acceptable to let the pictures tell parts of the story, where the radio commentator
cannot allow such long silences.
Live phone-in programmes
How the medium affects the message | Pragmatics | Lexis | Grammar | Discourse
features | Phonology
How the medium affects the message
A live phone-in programme happens in real time, and can create an impression of
spontaneity and risk - one never knows what the caller is going to say. It also uses a
familiar technology (which may help the caller feel confident) in conjunction with one
that most of us experience only as audiences, rather than as authors and presenters.
With the BBC's national networks, there is an unseen selection process for many
broadcasts. Callers contact a producer ahead of the programme, which leads to the
creation of a list of contributors whom the broadcaster calls back at the point where
they are to speak.
In studying particular examples of such programmes, you should find out as far as
possible, therefore, whether the presenters or any guests have advance notice of what
the questions will be. There may be an unstated house rule, such as limiting the time
allowed to any caller, unless he or she has something to say that merits disregarding
the rule.
Here are two short extracts (you will find longer versions of the transcripts from
which they come below). The first is from Call You and Yours, broadcast on BBC
Radio 4 in October 2004. The discussion here relates to the caller's experience of his
own Asperger's Syndrome and his son's autism. (.) marks a short pause; (0.5) a longer
pause measured in seconds; underlined text marks simultaneous (overlapping) speech.
56
Presenter: I er I may come back to Jane [Jane Asher, the expert guest] to talk about
that in a minute but I just want to ask you what difference does has has having a
diagnosis made to to you
Caller: (0.5) Not a great deal in practical terms, but it at least I I know that um that I
have it and I'm not and I haven't been deluding myself for the past five years (.) and it
it's useful in terms of self-definition just in terms of understanding oneself (.)
Expert guest: I (.) I'd be very interested to know, Russell, if I could just interrupt for a
second, how is it affected your relationship with your son (.) he presumably knows
that he is autistic
Caller: He does.
Expert guest: And how does he feel now that he knows you have a condition on the
same spectrum
Caller: He doesn't know that
Presenter: Yeah (.) Er
Caller: No, he doesn't know that
Expert guest: Do you think you will tell him that or is it easier for you
Caller: I think I'll
Expert guest: not to confuse him
Caller: I'll tell him that later on
The second extract is part of a transcript of 6-0-6, a soccer phone-in show, broadcast
on Radio FiveLive in March 2005.
Presenter: Good evening, Matthew
Caller: Hello therePresenter: Hiya (.) oh er you wanna talk about England (.) yeah
Caller: Yeah (.) I do
Presenter: Cool go for it
Caller: I do (.) I noticed on the news today that er everybody's talking about England
praps [perhaps] changing formation to accommodate [Joe] Cole (.) um
Pragmatics
In the case of a phone-in programme, this is likely to be a most important area of
language theory - since the object of the host or presenter, broadly speaking, is to help
57
people who have little or no experience of broadcasting to make a contribution to the
programme, in conjunction with the other callers.
In looking at transcripts, try to focus on the areas of pragmatics that are covered by:




taking and keeping turns;
conversational maxims and the cooperative principle;
politeness theory;
phatic tokens.
If you study the two short extracts, you will find lots of examples of the cooperative
principle, and you can test the various utterances against conversational maxims. Take
the first utterance by the presenter of Call You and Yours above. He wishes to ask his
own question but is conscious that so far his expert guest (Jane Asher) has said
nothing, so he signals his intention of bringing her into the conversation soon ("I er I
may come back to Jane to talk about that in a minute.") This enables him to keep the
turn in the conversation with a "but". When Jane Asher speaks to the caller, she uses
positive politeness "if I could just interrupt for a second" - but she is not really
interrupting, since she is meant to be taking part in the conversation and this is her
first utterance. Whereas the presenter's leading questions have allowed the caller to
give long and detailed (and highly controlled) responses, Jane Asher's conversational
style initiates something far more like social conversation with all three speakers
having short turns.
In the conversation from 6-0-6 the presenter and caller take turns. The presenter uses
frequent supportive overlap and gives appropriate feedback and reformulating what
the caller says. Look at the full transcript to see, too, how far the utterances conform
to the conversational maxims of quality, quantity, relevance and manner.
Lexis
In a written text, the author's sense of style may lead to a kind of evenness, through
control of the register - it may be chatty and colloquial, or it may be impersonal and
learned in manner, for example. In spontaneous speech it is not always so easy for a
speaker to sustain an even style in this way - you may find therefore a mixture of the
common register (what the AQA support booklet calls "simple and undemanding
vocabulary, typical of speech") with more learned or special lexis. The two transcripts
in this guide have just such a mixture - everything from "yeah" and "cool" to
"neuropsychologist". We see this unevenness in the second of the shorter extracts
below where the presenter begins with a formal: "Good evening, Matthew" and then
goes on to say "Cool, go for it". The caller reverses this, starting with less formal
"Hello" and "Yeah. I do", but quickly moving to a technical explanation of his ideas
for the English team's "changing formation to accommodate [Joe] Cole".
The two transcripts in this guide challenge the suggestions that


most of the lexis of the callers is "simple and undemanding vocabulary" and
further that
"simple and undemanding vocabulary" is "typical of speech".
The callers represented in the two extracts are, respectively, a man with a learning
difficulty and a supporter of the English football team - but their lexicon is at points
highly technical yet most appropriate to the subjects about which they speak.
58
You should also look out for accommodation - where a caller or presenter reflects the
other's lexical choices. See how the presenter of 6-0-6 says "yeah" and the caller at
once echoes this exact form, but otherwise does not use such informal lexis at any
point.
Grammar
In the second extract we see elliptical forms - phrases used as minor sentences ("Hello
there"; "Yeah"; "Cool"). In both extracts we see simple sentences ("He does"; "Go for
it"; "I do"). But in both cases the callers are capable of speaking in multiple or
complex structures while controlling the syntax:



I know that I have it and I haven't been deluding myself for the past five years,
and it's useful in terms of self-definition, just in terms of understanding
oneself.
I think I'll tell him that later on.
I noticed on the news today that everybody's talking about England perhaps
changing formation to accommodate Cole.
Interestingly, the caller with Asperger's Syndrome uses a technical lexicon (see the
full transcript below), to discuss autism in an informed way. But if we analyse his
long sentences, we see that they use multiple instances of "and", "but" and "so". Some
teachers deprecate these as lacking in sophistication, but this speaker is able to use
them to build highly sophisticated sequences.
Discourse features
For the presenter, as with a sports commentary, there is a sense of the whole broadcast
into which the various callers' contributions fit. They may have a notional upper and
lower time limit, which will allow them to vary the length of time for which each
caller speaks. Within this, there is a structure that we can see in the extracts.
For Call You and Yours, this is as follows:




Invite the caller to speak about what he or she has experienced or thinks.
Ask further questions (if the contribution merits these) to elicit more things the
audience might like to know.
Get the expert guest to comment or ask questions of the caller.
Close the contribution (not shown in the transcripts).
For 6-0-6 it is more simple (there is no expert guest):



Invite the caller to speak.
Ask further questions (if the contribution merits these) to elicit more things the
audience might like to know.
Close the contribution (not shown in the transcripts).
Phonology
59
The transcripts give only very limited information about phonology - showing where
there are pauses. In the context of broadcasting, speech sounds and features of accent
are interesting and may be suitable for research. But in assessment tasks that use a
printed transcript, this is unlikely to be identified as an important focus for comment.
(It is perhaps ironic that in studying language and technology, we do not make much
use of that technology. For some kinds of study, a transcript is still the most
appropriate way to record texts. But not all. It is perfectly possible for assessment
tasks to make use of digital audio recordings.)
In the case of the Call You and Yours broadcast, the presenter, Peter White, has a
regionally neutral accent close to Received Pronunciation, while Jane Asher is a more
traditional RP speaker. The caller, Russell has a mild regional accent, typical of
County Durham. For 6-0-6, the presenter, Mark Chapman, has an accent somewhere
between RP and Estuary. The caller, from Northamptonshire, has a south-eastern
regional accent, with some TH-fronting, referring to the 4-3-3 formation in football as
"four free free". Does this tell us anything interesting? Perhaps it shows how national
broadcasters and their audiences are comfortable with a range of accents, so long as
these are intelligible. Where once the BBC promoted a standard now it reflects the
diversity of voices among its audience.
Computers and Internet technologies
Web pages
How the medium affects the message | Pragmatics | Lexis | Grammar | Graphology |
Discourse features | Discourse and lumping and splitting
How the medium affects the message
"Web pages" is not a coherent or very useful description of anything - the variety of
documents on the World Wide Web is every bit as varied as the totality of documents
in print. While the latter has considerably more history (thousands of years, as
opposed to little more than a decade), the new medium is more demotic, since it
enables anyone to publish and reach wide audiences, without much restriction or
regulation.
For this reason, it is foolish to generalize about Web documents. The author may be
every bit as creative and eloquent as any great writer of print texts from the past - or
not.
The technology does, however, very much affect the relationship of author and
audience, often blurring the distinction so that many people have both rôles. And it
very much affects the economics of distribution, so that writers reach audiences that
outnumber those for which traditional authors strive, but do so without receiving any
payment - distributing texts (and other things, from images to applications) for free.
This is not necessarily or wholly altruistic - the nature of computer and Internet
technologies means that it is possible for all users to gain where those who can give
something do so, and everyone is able to take, since, unlike material goods, these
digital goods can be replicated infinitely at no cost to the original owner.
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The medium encourages experimentation and risk-taking. Since an author is not
constrained by an editor's or publisher's caution about what has been observed to sell
in the past, he or she can attempt to create different kinds of text.
According to research firm Technorati, a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds,
which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day... From humble beginnings, a
personal diary will attract millions of hits and then drive the traditional media's news
agenda.
CNN chief executive Eason Jordan...was forced to resign following a comment he
made about the Iraq war in an off-the-record discussion at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He is alleged to have said he knew of 12 journalists
who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, they had in fact been targeted.
Normally, this would have been huge news without the intervention of a blogger, but
the key phrase here is "off-the-record", an unwritten rule among journalists... In this
instance, it didn't strictly mean the comment couldn't be published: the discussion
panel was carried out under what's known as the "Chatham House Rule", according to
[which] "participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity
nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be
revealed."
These old media guidelines carry no weight with those who have turned their
computer terminals into self-styled publishing houses. Sitting among the delegates in
the audience was Rony Abovitz, founder of a medical technology company. He has
no grounding in old media journalism, but he has a blog. He challenged Jordan on his
claim and, despite the CNN chief backtracking, before long the words were available
on the Web...
It's further evidence that the blog is becoming a potent force, but this fact has been
well known in the technology industry for some time. The case of Jordan and, before
him, Dan Rather - the CBS anchorman toppled by an Internet campaign following a
flawed story about George W Bush - shows that blogs have the potential to bite the
hand that feeds them. But the media in general has welcomed them. We had the
Baghdad blogger, whose account of the US invasion of Iraq became one of the
world's most popular blogs two years ago. We've got blogging MPs, who see the
medium as the perfect way to make the connection with constituents. And we have
blogging "insiders".
Adapted from Paul Trotter's comment, Beware of the blog at
http://www.pcpro.co.uk
The medium also affects the message because Web browsing is not the same as
reading in most respects. Where once we might look through an encyclopaedia or
reference book, we might well search an informative Web site. But we would be far
less likely to read a long novel by looking at its text as displayed on a personal
computer - even though it is very easy for us to obtain the novel's text in this way.
We can think of this in another way - by identifying text types that have been popular
in print, and considering how well they would be adaptable to a Web environment. In
some cases, that might be literally a matter of making a word-processor or text file
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into an HTML document, while in others the adaptation might be more radical. And
one can see that there are some types of text - those which contain large amounts of
information, of which we may need, from time to time, only a given section
(encyclopaedias, dictionaries and so on) - that are improved by being made into Web
documents or databases, since the user can find the stuff he or she needs more easily,
and also since the nature of hypertext allows the same database or series of documents
to be presented in multiple ways (whereas a reference book has the pages in a fixed
sequence).
A further affordance of the technology is the ease with which the user can copy, adapt
and distribute such documents. We can do this either by saving the object we want
(some text and images, say) or more simply by sending another person (in an e-mail
or instant messenger conversation) the URL (uniform resource locator) that points to
the document. This means that we need not make a copy, since we can point a friend
to the original (and thus bypass any concerns about copyright).
Book publishing is expensive. It has become, therefore, a highly commercial
enterprise. There is a complex system whereby books are promoted, recommended
and hyped. For most documents on the World Wide Web, there is no incentive to do
this. The owners of many sites that sell services will pay the providers of some search
engines, in order to achieve a favourable listing. But many other search engines
(notably Google at http://www.google.com) do not rank sites according to payment,
but according to methods that assess criteria of merit, as determined by
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other sites linking to the site in question,
the dependent links of those other sites, and
statistics of use.
In effect, search engines like Google rate every site by an objective system that
measures its popularity with other Web designers and general users. The odd result is
that, compared to print, Web publishing is at once highly anarchic and unregulated,
yet democratic and meritocratic - the users decide collectively what they like. Many
users prefer such search engines to those that determine rank according to payment,
both on grounds of principle, but also pragmatic grounds - these search engines are
better at finding documents that fulfil the searchers expectations.
Pragmatics
To the publisher or author of Web documents, pragmatics are very important, yet
often overlooked. For many kinds of print text, because the conventions of publishing
are well established, we do not spell out what they are, and how the reader should use
them. (The novelist does not, except in rare cases like Tristram Shandy, draw the
reader's attention to the fact that the work is fiction; he or she gets on with the story,
and the reader knows how to read it, and believe in it.)
When you look at a Web site, you should consider how far the home page lets the user
know what kind of collection of documents this is - and why he or she should stay.
And such information may be more or less honest. Take the example of sites that
provide learning objects that may support teachers and students.
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
One author or publisher believes that this is not ever likely to be entertaining,
but thinks that such objects may enable the user to find things (often difficult
things) out more swiftly and conveniently than other methods. (After which,
the user can go somewhere else and be properly entertained.)
Another author or publisher believes that users will be put off by any apparent
(or real) difficulty, and so suggests that his or her site will make the hard
subjects easy to learn, and will do so in ways that are entertaining. In order to
fulfil this promise the publisher makes learning objects into a series of games,
and avoids exposition of the more difficult areas of learning. The BBC's
GCSE Bitesize revision site does this with messages like: "Bored to death with
revision?! Play Tombstone Timeout and other games". It also promotes
(without referring to any evidence) the idea that learners will revise more
effectively if the information is presented in small quantities.
Look, too, at any information about ownership and use of the documents. Are there
messages that tell you all the things that you cannot do (sometimes you can, but they
will be illegal) or are there messages that encourage you to use the documents freely?
Many Web documents will address you, as the user directly (for example, using
second person verbs and directives). They may invite you to contribute to the site, by
posting on a message board, and may also give you a means to send comments,
suggestions and corrections to the publishers. Alternatively, you may find sites where
the authors publish content without any explicit reference (or deference) to an
audience - using a take-it-or-leave-it approach: since they have no need to earn
income from the writing, then it can be offered to the world without any hype or
advertising.
A Web page can be more or less polite, too. If that seems strange, let me explain.
Some Web designers force on the user a range of actions that he or she has not chosen
- when you open the page, a movie or an audio file loads and plays, or an animated
image moves around. Apart from the fact that the user did not ask for it, the effect
may slow down considerably the time that it takes for the page to appear in the
browser or other device. Courteous designers will devise similar actions - but make
them into interactions, by giving the user the choice (presented as an invitation) of
whether or not to make them happen, and indicating the size of the object and the
bandwidth required to deliver it.
Lexis
The lexis of the World Wide Web is the lexis of the world - it is global English, and
every other language that can be represented digitally. (Currently this excludes a few
languages that can be represented in print, but which are used by very small
populations. Yet the range of languages that can be represented digitally includes the
first and second languages of the vast majority of people in the world, and in most
cases the digital technology is more efficient and user-friendly than print
technologies).
In some kinds of document there may be a tendency for the writers to use novel or
fashionable lexis, but broadly speaking you would expect to find that the vocabulary
choices of any writer reflect the nature of the text he or she is writing.
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You can, if you wish, find documents that are published by people with advanced
technical knowledge for others like them. But such writers do not now dominate the
World Wide Web (perhaps they never did). You can easily verify this by searching
for sites on any subject, trashy, trivial, commonplace or just specialized - from New
Zealand dog lovers to Texan blacksmiths. (If you do want technical language, try the
World Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3.org.)
Grammar
There is nothing generally distinctive about the grammar of documents on the Web,
any more than there is about that of printed and written documents. You may be more
likely to encounter non-standard forms than in print, since print publications are more
regulated by editors and supported by proof-readers. The technology does not cause
the writers to use these non-standard forms - indeed, it gives them tools to help avoid
such usages. But it allows them to publish their unchecked efforts, so that others can
see these texts, which may contain the non-standard grammar.
You can use grammar as a tool for checking pragmatics - by looking at pronoun use
and person in verb forms, as well as use of directives: where the designer speaks
straight to the audience you will find
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
second person pronouns and possessives (you, your, yours) and
imperative or directive verb forms.
Graphology
Web publishing typically exploits graphic effects extensively. These include such
things as:
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Displaying images (still or moving) in a document.
Using coloured text and backgrounds.
Using different styles and sizes of text.
Organizing pages with frames or tables.
Fixing the width of pages and columns of text.
Ideally in using these effects the designer will seek to do one or both of two things:


be aesthetically pleasing, and
make the page more accessible to the user.
The aesthetic aspect of the design may also relate the appearance to the purpose of the
document - either by reinforcing a convention or subverting it: so a bank's home page
may be restrained and simple (because its business is serious) or vibrant and colourful
(because it challenges the conventional view and suggests a fresh approach). But it
should never be a mess.
Most of these effects are (and should be) static - so that you might find something
similar in some kinds of print text (a magazine or reference book, say). Others may be
more interactive or dynamic.
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Discourse features
This is an area where Web publishing differs massively from print publishing - or
may do. You may sometimes find documents that are coherent and useful on their
own, that stand alone, as we say. But mostly you will find documents organized into
collections with systems for navigation. Compared to print, the user's view is very
different from what the designer knows about the size and structure of the collection.
If we concentrate on individual documents, as this is what you will be expected to do
for assessment, then you may find them sometimes organized in ways that resemble
print texts. Sometimes a document will contain a single coherent text. In other cases,
the user will see a page that contains multiple texts, which may be displayed in their
entirety, or may be teasers and introductions to other texts on the same site (or
elsewhere).
The key to this is the single most powerful feature of the Web page - the hyperlink.
Most (not all) Web documents are written in HTML (hyper-text mark-up language) or
its near relations DHTML (dynamic HTML) and XML (extended mark-up language).
Over time, XML will become more or less universal, as it enables the writer to add
information about a text that is future-proof (for example, instructions about how to
display it on devices that have not yet been invented). The idea of a mark-up language
is that it separates two things:
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
the information (text, images, audio files) to be displayed to the user, and
instructions about how to display these things, according to the user's
situation, browser, platform and so on.
This enables us to design a document that will display differently, but appropriately,
on a range of computers and monitors, personal digital assistants (PDAs or handhelds) or other devices, such as TVs and mobile phones, and be usable by visuallyimpaired people with alternative browsing devices. This is simply not possible with
print documents.
The mark-up languages also enable the designer to include many interactions to help
the user find his or her way around a document, and out of it, to other documents. (A
bad designer can use the same things to lose or confuse the user.) Chief among these
is the hyperlink that enables the user, by a mouse click or other action, to move from
one point in a document, to another point in the same document, or to any point in a
different document. And it can do so within the same open window in which the user
is browsing the current document, or it can open a new window. (That is, it can do
these by default; the user always has options to over-ride the defaults, usually by a
right-hand mouse button click, which opens a dialogue or menu.)
Discourse and lumping and splitting
Is the designer a lumper (like me) or a splitter? Some designers (not me) believe that
no page should contain very much text for the visitor to look at, as this can be
intimidating. But this may mean that to give the visitor lots of information, the
designer makes us use lots of mouse clicks, and perhaps not find what we are looking
for. A (lumper) page with lots of information may take longer to load. But once it is
loaded in the browser, the visitor can move around the page more quickly. And if we
save to our PC (on a hard drive, floppy disk or other media) a long document that is
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on one page, we do not need to locate lots of files, and perhaps cause links not to
work, if we want to read it later.
So, how can a designer avoid frightening visitors with masses of text? The answer is
to put lots of navigation on the page - hyperlinks to anchors on each section of the
HTML document. The designer can also make sure he or she has quick links back to
the top of a page, and clear space between sections of text.
There is no right or wrong here. It is a matter of writing in a structure that is suitable
to the audience. If a site is aimed at casual viewers, it may need shorter passages of
text, than if it is written for people who are prepared for detailed content. One
problem with splitting, as a way of organizing a longer document, is that it is limiting
- it more or less forces the designer to break the document into sections of a given
length, even though the logical organization may make these very uneven. And it
works against the logic of a hierarchy of heading levels. Finally, it makes it harder for
the user to see the whole structure of the document.
Electronic mail
A promising start | Why e-mail is unreliable | How the medium affects the message etiquette and netiquette
A promising start
In the early days of Internet technologies, electronic mail was the first "killer"
application that used the Internet to revolutionize communication. Initially the mail
passed from one computer to another, using a client programme that would connect to
a remote Web server and send and receive mail.
Within a few years, users and developers had found three ways to make the
technology more flexible for the user. These were:
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
using different text formats (such as rich text and HTML) for the body text in
messages;
enabling the systems to attach data files to the messages, and
developing Web interfaces to use the mail service online.
The first two of these have proved to do more harm than good, and today e-mail is no
longer reliable as a secure means of communication because of this. So what are the
problems?
Why e-mail is unreliable
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
Using formats other than plain text, and attaching large data files, means that
e-mail now uses far more of the bandwidth on the Internet (causing it to run
more slowly, in spite of increased capacity - very much like gridlock on
roads).
Using these formats and allowing attachments have made e-mail a highly
effective technology for spreading viruses and other malicious software.
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
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The current standards for transfer of mail allow systems that fake or spoof the
sender's address - so that the distributors of viruses and unsolicited messages
(spam) can avoid detection, blocking and any legal penalties for criminal
actions.
Unlike unsolicited postal mail, sending spam is very inexpensive - it can even
be made to cost the sender nothing, by the use of systems that hi-jack other
users' computers and turn them into spam factories. Spammers also have robot
systems that find and compile legitimate e-mail addresses that are displayed
anywhere on the World Wide Web. The result of this is that currently (2005)
spam accounts for far more of the total e-mail traffic on the Internet than other
legitimate messages. The result for all users is that we discard two or three
such messages for every message that we really wish to read.
This means that anti-spam and filtering systems will either allow through lots
of harmful messages or, in blocking these, also filter out lots of legitimate
traffic. It may also block messages from innocent e-mail addresses where
these have been used by messages sent from computers infected by a virus or
by spammers.
The simple and inevitable result of this is that now many legitimate messages
sent by real individuals in good faith will never arrive. The sender may feel
hurt that the intended recipient has apparently rejected the message. And any
of us will feel annoyed to receive an automated message from a Web server
that tells us of a message we supposedly sent, containing a virus or with a
harmful attachment - when in reality, the message was sent from somewhere
else.
As a way of combating malicious exploits, many mail systems will now
display all messages as plain text only. If the sender uses rich text or HTML,
the system will display the control characters of the former (which will seem
meaningless) or the tags and other code of the latter, which will obscure the
message.
How the medium affects the message - etiquette and netiquette
Technical etiquette | Personal etiquette | Pragmatics | Lexis | Grammar | Discourse
features | Orthography
Technical etiquette
Use of e-mail can show you a lot about the sender's understanding of the technology.
Many users of computers assume that things will appear to everyone as they do on
their own systems - even though the other people may be using wholly different
operating systems, applications and types of computer, with different display
technology, installed fonts and so on. Other users will send a short message,
explaining that they are attaching a word-processed document - that contains
information as text, which could have been more simply included in the body of the
message...
Electronic mail systems normally display certain information by default (such as who
sent the message, at what time, the total file size of the message and any attachments).
They also prompt the user to provide a text description of the message in the subject
line. Many users omit to complete this (which may cause the recipient to discard the
message, assuming it to be carrying a virus). More commonly, they will receive a
message, then forward it or reply to it, without altering the subject line. I have
observed users of a discussion list for language teachers do this through a long series
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of iterations (replies and forwardings), such that the current message has a subject that
is no longer relevant to the original subject line. Given that these messages are often
requests for guidance, the inattention to this detail may mean that people disregard the
message, supposing that they know the subject. Every so often a user of the list will
post a message of complaint, that she or he receives too many messages, cannot cope
with them and is therefore leaving the list - which suggests that instead of reading the
subject lines and opening those that are of interest, while trashing the rest, this user is
trying to read everything.
This may reveal something more important underlying the use of e-mail. We may be
not sure whether to regard it as akin to personal postal mail (to which we may feel we
should respond in some way) or as something impersonal that we can receive but to
which we have no need to reply. The efficiency of the technology and the consequent
proliferation of messages mean that in time no one may be able to reply to everything
that arrives.
Some users apply the technology further. They set an e-mail client to acknowledge
receipt of everything automatically. (This tells the sender that his or her message has
arrived, but not that the recipient has opened it or read it.) Others will set the mail
server to notify senders of messages that they are "away" (during a holiday period, for
example) and will respond on their return. This may be useful in explaining an
unexpected delay in a response - but it also increases the total volume of traffic. (It
can also cause unintended spam, where an automated system sends a reply to list
server, which then does the same, while copying the message to the list
membership...)
Personal etiquette
In conversations (face-to-face, by phone, instant messenger or chat) there is a lot of
opportunity for back channelling and politeness. If we make a mistake, we can usually
retract it, or repair the interaction. In e-mails this is less easy to achieve. Users of
discussion lists will notice how frequently one person posts a message that appears (to
one or more of the recipients) to be discourteous or inappropriately critical. The
offended recipient responds to notify the others of the supposed discourtesy, after
which the disagreement may become more widespread or (happily more common in
the lists to which I have belonged) the various parties will send further messages,
which explicitly seek to repair the supposed damage and affirm (or reaffirm) how
highly they regard each other, and more in the same vein.
In this respect, e-mail is very much like talk. In one-to-one conversations, it is easier
to maintain a polite exchange. (If I seem critical of my correspondent, he or she will
not think I am scoring points, as I might be in a public exchange.) But the possibility
exists that either of us will copy the correspondence to a third party (as we may report
what someone said) for whom it was not intended. The technology does not
fundamentally change the ways in which language makes personal interactions
happen - but it can extend its reach and efficiency. As well as upsetting my neighbour,
I can now upset a crowd, or someone in another continent.
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From: "Jxxx Xxxxx"
Date: 27/02/2005 10:14AM
Subject: Poetry
Hi XXXXX
One of your correspondents was asking for sites giving access to poems. I'm afraid I
deleted his email before I remembered this place (all my old "favourites" got wiped
when I upgraded my operating system and I'm only retrieving them at the rate I need
them again). It's pretty good - wide-ranging, lots of poems and poets, and pretty good
search functions (though I'd like to have the ability to search thematically,
stylistically, by poetic form and period, and with an interactive time line, and
biographies, and poem notes, and literary reviews... and cultural context material...
and... and... and...). Anyway, for future reference, it's http://www.poemhunter.com/
Jxxx
Above is a short message sent by electronic mail, in which the sender gives some
information that she thinks the recipient might find useful. It was not sent in response
to a request from him, but both sender and recipient are friends who frequently
exchange messages through e-mail and instant messenger (and occasional telephony
and face-to-face meeting).
Pragmatics
This message is best understood as part of a continuing conversation (or series of
conversations) about English language and literature, and teaching and learning. So
let's look at it in terms of conversational maxims and politeness theory. For the
former, we see:
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
Quality: the utterance is truthful and based on evidence (the sender refers to
the evidence by giving the address of the Web site she recommends).
Quantity: the message is brief (perhaps reflecting some haste in composition it was sent from the writer's workplace in the mid morning), but long enough
to provide detailed information about the resource it recommends.
Relevance: the sender explains the relevance, in terms of a past request to the
recipient.
Manner: the message is clear, orderly and brief, avoiding ambiguity.
In terms of politeness theory, this message has features of positive politeness by
attending to the recipient's perceived wishes or needs ("One of your correspondents
was asking..."), and assuming agreement (that the recipient will value the suggestion).
Behind this is a clear understanding of shared common knowledge, as in the reference
to "his e-mail" (which the sender expects the recipient to remember forwarding to
her), and more generally in the sense of sharing her interest in knowing about Web
sites that they can recommend to other people like the correspondent who asked for
details of such sites.
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The directness and efficiency of the language might seem curt if this were a message
from a stranger, but the writer uses a more terse style because she and the recipient
have come to use this in other contexts - it is more or less in keeping with the style of
interactions they both use in instant messaging.
Lexis
This is very much that of the writer's speaking voice - a mixture of everyday
conversational vocabulary (hi, pretty good [twice], anyway) and special lexis both to
explain something that happened to the sender's computer (favourites, upgraded,
operating system) and to comment on the site (thematically, stylistically, cultural
context).
Grammar
This writer is confident in her control of sentence grammar, and uses a range of
structures, beginning with a sentence that has a simple main clause, but appends a
relative clause ("giving access to poems") at the end.
There are several parentheses, one of which occurs in a very complex sentence
(beginning: "It's pretty good"). The writer is able to use standard forms throughout.
The writer has a sophisticated sense (as a teacher) that repeated use of simple
conjunctions is deprecated by other teachers, so after six uses of and, she adds a series
of three more without any referents. (This use also has a pragmatic resonance - the
writer may know that the recipient favours the plain use of and, and that he thinks the
common disapproval of simple forms to be both pretentious, and illogical, since plain
writing and speaking are usually appropriate for giving information, as happens here.
So the apparent self-mockery is really advertising the virtue of the supposed "fault" of
the writer in using and so frequently.)
Discourse features
In an e-mail message, some of the discourse features are automated - in the header
information, and sometimes (though not here) in information at the end of the
message (typical of business and governmental messages, that contain a disclaimer,
suggesting that the provider of the mail service is not liable for the opinions expressed
by the sender).
In this case we know



the sender's name (the form of her name that she has chosen to display in
messages sent from this system - she uses her given name and family name,
but this could be anything the user chooses),
her e-mail address (available for replying, copying to other people, adding to
an address book and so on) and
the time when the message was sent from the mail-server (which here is close
to the time when she sent the message from her computer).
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This sender completes the subject line, and uses a simple salutation: "Hi, [recipient
name]", closing the message with her name alone.
Orthography
The sender uses standard forms of spelling and punctuation throughout (this is not
onerous, as she knows the forms). She also gives the full URL of the Web site,
suggesting either knowledge of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) prefix or that
she has copied the URL from a browser address bar, and pasted it into the body of the
message.
Example text with commentary
Text message from The Dating Channel
Pragmatics | Lexis | Grammar | Discourse | Orthography
305088 hi you,rob from hants
here,fancy a chat? Im 31,fit
and up for fun.text me .xx
Pragmatics
An individual sends this message, not to another individual, but to a broadcaster who
displays it on a digital TV station (The Dating Channel). This is not a message to a
friend, so there is no obvious sense of any elliptical expression that relies on the
recipient's sharing knowledge with the sender.
We can perhaps understand this best as the sender's attempt to address the recipient
(identified by the number 305088) in some ways as he would do in a face-to-face
meeting, but supplying some information that would be obvious (or obviously false)
in that situation.
It is possible that the sender is neither called Rob nor from Hants (Hampshire) but that
seems unlikely in this context, since the purpose of the Dating Channel is to bring
people together with prospective partners.
While including the invitations to talk ("fancy a chat?") or send a text message ("text
me") and concluding with "xx", Rob otherwise uses the message to give a description
of himself. He does not use all 160 available characters - in fact the message has only
85, including spaces. This may suggest that there is nothing more to say, or that he
thinks the recipient knows all that matters about him, his age, the county where he
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lives, his being fit and "up for fun". As part of a courtship ritual, it is extremely terse
where one might expect more display or attempt to suggest individual qualities.
The non-standard spacing and punctuation may suggest some haste in composition
(though the spelling uses standard forms).
Lexis
The message contains the vocabulary of everyday speech with the exception of the
two names of the sender and his county. Hi is a typical interjection in speech while fit
(if it is used in the modern sense of attractive) and up for ("eager for, enthusiastic
about") are also typical of informal spoken English.
Grammar
Though not clearly demarcated by the punctuation at all points, this contains five
sentences (or six if we count the "xx" at the end).
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
The first two ("Hi you" and "[It is] rob from hants here) are minor sentences;
the next is a question;
the fourth is a compound sentence: "I'm 31, fit and up for fun." while
the last is a directive: ("Text me").
Discourse
The five sentences and the concluding "kisses" give the message a remarkably clear
structure:






Salutation: hi you
Introduction of self: [It is] rob from hants here
nvitation to talk, in question form: [Do you] fancy a chat?
Description of self: Im 31,fit and up for fun.
Repeating of invitation, in directive form: text me.
Closing greeting: xx
One could argue that the introduction and description should be together, but by
separating them Rob provides two spaces for his invitation to talk. Given the 160character limit, this is a quite ambitious structure for the discourse.
This message, however, may be part of a larger discourse, if Rob receives any replies,
and develops any of these into exchanges of messages, forming a sustained
conversation. He clearly expresses a wish that someone will reply and help him to
achieve this.
Orthography
72
Use of lower case letters throughout suggests either haste and/or a disregard for
distinctions of case (the convenience of using lower case can become a reason for
favouring it generally).
The lexis is simple, but Rob has the standard spellings in every case. By contrast his
use of punctuation marks and spaces is almost wholly non-standard, with the
exception of a correctly placed question mark.
Example texts
Sports commentary | Radio Phone-in | Electronic mail | Telephone conversations |
Represented texts
For the Web version of this guide, I have not included any examples of Web sites and
other documents on the World Wide Web, for the obvious reason that you can obtain
these directly for yourself.
Sports commentary
Text 1
This is a transcript of the broadcast commentary on BBC Radio FiveLive, for a match
between Manchester United and Chelsea in the English Premiership, in October 1999.
The commentator is Alan Green (G), while Bryan Hamilton (ex player) is the expert
summarizer (H). Mike Ingham (I) is the studio anchor, introducing newsflashes from
other matches. Steve May (M) is a reporter at another match being played at the same
time. This is part of a longer transcript made by Richard Lappin as part of an
investigation in 2000. October 10, 1999; 20:00 to 25:00 (approx.)
G: Gianluca Vialli today in the programme notes said welcome to the best team in
Europe, they're not the best team in Europe this afternoon at Stamford Bridge.
Manchester United's contribution so far has been very very poor. Defensively er
unsound to say the least. Outplayed and out-thought in midfield. I feel sorry for the
two up front Yorke and Cole because they haven't got a ball.
H: Yeah Yeah you're quite right the service hasn't been very good.
G: Oh but what's going on here between Scholes and Wise, er there was free kick
awarded inside the centre-circle, oh there's a red card been produced.
H: Yeah Nicky Butt, I think it's Nicky Butt has goneG: Oh now what is going on here,
Wise has lost his boot, Andy Cole is getting involved, there's a there's a sort of
handbags at six paces there a lot of unhappy Manchester United players, and er David
Beckham is er trying to usher Nicky Butt off the pitch. Nicky Butt has been dismissed
here at Stamford Bridge, things go from bad to worse for the European Cup holders
and the Double holders. Manchester United down to ten men and two nil down, Bryan
Hamilton.
H: Yes it was a rash tackle by Dennis Wise in the middle of the park, his boots were
too high that's for sure, but just as the referee had given the incident, er Nicky Butt
was on the ground, he appeared to get up there seemed to be contact and er the referee
appeared to have no option but to send him the red card. It was the one area of
73
concern for me that I felt that Manchester United had lost that little bit of discipline
after that er bad start they had made and it was so important for them to keep that
discipline, they lost it and they're now down to ten men.
I: Penalty at Tottenham, Steve May.
M: And it's gone to Leicester, Muzzy Izzet about to take it against Walker and he's
scored. Muzzy Izzet has scored his sixth goal of the season. Leicester one Spurs nil,
its er if you like come against the run of play because for the opening exchanges
Spurs very much dominated although Leicester did get the ball in the net through
Heskey, but we had a penalty when Heskey was brought down by Tarrico and Izzet
has converted. It's Leicester one, Spurs nil.
G: Ed de Goey has just made a great save from Paul Scholes, so Manchester United
down to ten men in this dramatic game at Stamford Bridge, this is five live football,
it's Chelsea two, Manchester United nil. Oh, interesting little game, its busy out there
isn't it. I mean I have got to admit I didn't see the incident with Nicky Butt, I just did
not see the incident with Nicky Butt. Er there was a replay on a far flung monitor
which suggested that Wise's foot was a little bit high as well, but er I don't know, but
the referee saw it that's for sure and Butt's off. Manches...
H: I think that's what
G: Sorry Bryan
H: I think that's what happened Alan, er I think it was just a rash tackle by Dennis
Wise in the middle of the park, Nicky Butt was on the ground, he took exception to it,
but now Chelsea are coming at them again.
Radio Phone-in
Text 1a
BBC Radio 4, Call You and Yours, October 2004
The programme was one of a special series, run over three weeks, on the subject of
autism.
The presenter is Peter White (PW).
The expert guest is Jane Asher (JA).
The caller is Russell S (RS)
Underlined text indicates that two speakers are talking simultaneously.
(.) indicates a short pause.
Numbers in brackets indicate a longer pause in seconds.
This extract (1a) comes from earlier in the programme by way of an introduction. The
extract in Text 1b comes later in the programme, in a continuous section of
74
contributions from callers; the extract includes a large part of the first caller's
contribution.
PW: Well Jane Asher thank you (.) er (.) very much for the moment. Jane will be with
us throughout the phone-in and a way by high highlighting the problems of adults
that's one of the things we'd like to highlight and if we could hear from more of you
who either have the condition or perhaps have relatives who are coping we do give us
a call (.) we want to hear people's personal experiences (.) we also want to hear from
people who are grappling with where and how to educate their child or just getting a
diagnosis in the first place. Phone us with your stories and experiences on 08700 100
444 you can still e-mail us via the Web site at BBC dot co dot uk (.) slash radio 4 (.)
slash You and Yours
Text 1b
PW: Do call us (.) we want to hear your personal stories, 08700 100 444 is the
number to ring and with me to take your calls is Jane Asher the actress who is
President of the National Autistic Society (.) let's go to the callers first of all (.)
Russell S from [place name] Russell
RS: Hullo
PW: Good afternoon erm tell me about yourself
RS: Erm (.) I'm I'm 45 years old (.) I've got a diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome about
a year ago (.) I also have a 14-year old son who is autistic and dyspraxic (.) and it took
me (.) about um five years to get a diagnosis er so I'm delighted at what what Jane
Asher's just said about adult services at the beginning of the programme so I'd like to
strongly agree with that (.) there is almost nothing available for us (.) er (.)
PW: Can I ask you why you were see (.) you you sought the diagnosis yourself did
you really
RS: That's right (.) it's due to my son's autism that I er began to read about autism and
particularly read accounts written by autistic adults and it it it made sense of my own
um childhood and younger years (.) the the sorts of problems that I've had over the
years
PW: And what sort of problems did you run up against in trying to get a a diagnosis
RS: Um well really er what what I can say now having explored the system and
having set up a support group for adults with autism and er related conditions here in
the north-east, and talked to other people about it (.) it's really the the different parts
of the health service don't know what other parts are doing and there isn't er a clear
diagnostic route (.) GPs tend to refer adults seeking a diagnosis to the mental health
services whereas the diagnosticians tend to be employed by the Learning Disability
Trusts (.) and er the the LD Trust and Mental Health Trusts don't know what the
others are doing (.) in my particular case I was referred to a neuropsychologist who
was employed by the Mental Health Trust who did who ran the tests which provided
the hard scientific evidence that I had Asperger's and yet I had to be cross-referred to
75
the Learning Disability Trust to get the actual diagnosis from a psychiatrist
PW: I er I may come back to Jane to talk about that in a minute but I just want to ask
you what difference does has has having a diagnosis made to to you
RS: (0.5) Not a great deal in practical terms but it at least I I know that um that I have
it and I'm not (.) and I haven't been deluding myself for the past five years (.) and it
it's useful in terms of self-definition just in terms of understanding oneself (.)
JA: I (.) I'd be very interested to know Russell if I could just interrupt for a second
how is it affected your relationship with your son (.) he presumably knows that he is
autistic
RS: He does
JA: And how does he feel now that he knows you have a condition on the same
spectrum
RS: He doesn't know that
PW: Yeah (.) er
RS: No (.) he doesn't know that
JA: Do you think you will tell him that or is it easier for you
RS: I think I'll
JA: not to confuse him
RS: I'll tell him that later on
Text 2
BBC Radio FiveLive, 6-0-6, March 23rd, 2005
The presenter is Mark Chapman (shown here as MC).
The caller is Matthew (M).
Underlined text indicates that two speakers are talking simultaneously.
(.) indicates a short pause.
Numbers in brackets indicate a longer pause in seconds.
MC: If you'd like to give me a ring then feel free to do so, 0500 999 693. Matthew is
in Northamptonshire (.) good evening Matthew
M: Hello there
76
M:C: Hiya (.) oh er you wanna talk about England yeah
M:Yeah (.) I do.
M:C: Cool go for it.
M:I do (.) I noticed on the news today that er everybody's talking about England praps
[perhaps] changing formation to accommodate Cole (.) um
M:C: Yeah
M:That's Joe Cole (.) in a four three three (0.5) um I would advocate change of an
England formation but not to a four three three
M:C: What would you like
M:I wanna three man central defence because I do feel now (.) OK I do realize that
Sol Campbell at present is not fit but I do feel that Sol Campbell, Rio Ferdinand and
John Terry are now all good too good to leave any one of them out
M:C: So how then would everything else fit around
M:Well
M:C: that (.) I take your point that all three of them er we are seriously overloaded
with really good centre halves
M:Yeah
M:C: I was talking to Michael Owen today and he was stressing how how impressed
he is with the centre half situation as regards the England team but how
M:Well
M:C: Would everybody else fit around that
M:Well I think it solves two problems (.) not only do we are much stronger in central
defensive area
M:C: Yeah
M:In fact as you've just said an embarrassment of riches but I do feel that it m (.)
allows us to then have to accommodate only one left-sided player (.) and
M:C: Yeah
M:Of course that left-sided player's Ashley Cole (.) so er you know instead of playing
four four two and having to look for two left-sided players, you play three five two or
five when we haven't got the ball at the back and that means y (.) only need one leftsided player, Ashley Cole.
M:C: So then who would you have on the right
77
M:(0.5) Um I'd probably play (0.5) currently Wright-Philips because I think
M:C: Right
M:if you're going to play three central defenders (.) that means you need a lot of pace
on the wing
Electronic mail
Text 1
From: XXXXX@dfes.gsi.gov.uk [mailto:XXXX@dfes.gsi.gov.uk]
Sent: 13 November, 2003 15:11
Subject: Curriculum Online Newsletter
Dear Curriculum Online Supplier
Please find attached the first edition of our new-look newsletter. It contains a lot of
important information on tagging resources and in particular the launch of the new
version of our Tagging Tool.
<<November Newsletter.doc>>
This edition is primarily of interest to those of you who have registered as Content
Providers, but Retailers may also find it interesting to learn of recent developments.
If you would like to be added to the distribution list for future copies of this newsletter
or have your details removed from the list, please let me know.
Jim XXXXX
Operations Manager
Curriculum Online
Direct Line: XXXX XXX XXXX
Fax: XXXX XXX XXXX
Text 2
From: Mxxx XXXX [mailto:Mxxx.XXXX@XXXX.org.uk]
Sent: 01 November, 2002 11:43To: 'xxxx.xxxxx@xxxx.net'
Subject: RE: XXXX: Your Curriculum Online application
Dear Xxxx
thank you for your comments below. I have forwarded them to the DfES
forconsideration.
Financial checks are just one of the several checks made on everyorganisation
applying to become a registered content provider or retailerfor Curriculum Online.
78
The purpose of these checks is allow the Departmentto ensure, so far as is reasonable,
that the information about suppliers iscorrect. Such checks are made on those not
currently charging for theirproducts as well as those intending to charge. It is just one
more way ofattempting to confirm that the information about suppliers is valid.
Inaddition, these suppliers may decide to charge for their products in future.The
Department is keen to emphasise that schools, as always, are responsiblefor checking
that the suppliers they are dealing with meet their commercialand contractual needs.
If you can provide bank statements or a reference from your bank then wewill be able
to continue to process your application.
Regards
Mxxx
Telephone conversations
Text 1
Telephone conversation from 1973, between Henry Kissinger (US secretary of state
and national security adviser) and Brent Scowcroft (US National Security Adviser);
re-transcribed from a photocopy of a typed transcript from the US National Archives
and Records Administration, posted on the Smoking Gun archive in 2004. October
11, 1973; 7:55 p.m.
October 11, 1973; 7:55 p.m.
K: Hello.
S: This is..., Henry. The switchboard just got a call from 10 Downing Street to inquire
whether the President would be available for a call within 30 minutes from the Prime
Minister. The subject would be the Middle East.
K: Can we tell them no? When I talked to the President he was loaded.
S: We could tell him the President is not available and perhaps he can call you.
K: I will be at Mr. Bradens and the President will be available tomorrow morning
some time.
S: Are you coming over here at all this evening?
K: No, first thing in the morning.
S: Did you talk to [unidentifiable] about the F-4s scheduled for tomorrow?
K: I think a two a day is fine.
S: Two a day can...
K: Throw in another one and make it six.
S: They have in mind keeping a two-a-day schedule. Send two from here and two
from Europe and then two from here again.
K: For an indefinite period?
S: At least through six.
K: Then tell Dinitz he is getting at least six but that we may keep it going.
S: Right, OK. I will say the President will not be available until first thing in the
morning but you will be this evening.
K: In fact, I would welcome it.
S: Very good.
79
From http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive
Text 2
From a transcript released in October 1993, by the Mollen Commission, created in
1992 by to investigate corruption in New York City Police Department. The speakers
are:A: an Internal Affairs Bureau Officer; B: a Mollen Commission Investigator
A: Internal Affairs.
B: Yes, hi! Mmmm. I have some information regarding, ah, a boss, ah, in the Police
Department and ah A: A what?
B: A boss. Mmmm, he's, mmmm, like a big boss.
A: Right.
B: In the Police Department. I'm just, like, trying to decide. Mmmm, I don't know
what to do really.[Pause]
B: It's just that I haven't been able to decide what I should do with the information. It
has to do with, mmmm, him. I know he's doing so many bad things. Mmmm. I just
don't know - [Pause]
B: What do you think I should do?
A: Oh, I don't know. You have to do whatever you feel is right. Whatever you think,
you know. It's up to you.
B: I know he's, like, heavily in corruption and - and I know his name and everything. I
just, I just don't know.
A: Well, when you have the information, ah, let me know if you want to decide.
Whenever you decide, give me a call. Call this number anytime.
B: I haven't decided if I should remain anonymous.
A: What?
B: I could remain anonymous?
A: Yeah.
B: I think I'd feel more comfortable if I don't give my name. I know his name, I, I just,
I'm not sure if I should disclose all this information.
A: Well, you know, I mean, I can't make you. Ah, hold on a minute, I got another call.
Hold on.
B: Okay. [Caller put on hold for 6 minutes, 55 seconds]
A: Hello?
B: Yes.
A: Make up your mind yet?
B: No, no. Ah, I was hearing, like, a beep. What is that?
A: That's a tape recorder.
B: Oh, because does that mean I could be identified?
A: Ah, not really, I mean, there's a voice identification. I mean, ah, there's a lot of
ways, if you want to be identified. They could, ah, have that, ah, call, ah - what do
you call that thing, you press a button, you find out what number you're calling from?
There's that and there's voice identification, you know. Hold, hold on a minute. I got
another phone call, all right?
From http://www.findarticles.com
80
Represented texts
Text 1
From All My Sons, Arthur Miller,1947
KELLER (with overriding affection and self-confidence now. He grips Chris by the
back of the neck, and with laughter between his determined jaws): Look, Chris, I'll go
to work on Mother for you. We'll get her so drunk tonight we'll all get married! (Steps
away, with a wide gesture of his arm.) There's gonna be a wedding, kid, like there
never was seen! Champagne, tuxedos - I
He breaks off as ANN'S voice comes out loud from the house where she is still talking
on phone. ANN: Simply because when you get excited you don't control yourself ...
(Mother comes out of house.) Well, what did he tell you for God's sake? (Pause.) All
right, come then. (Pause.) Yes, they'll all be here. Nobody's running away from you.
And try to get hold of yourself, will you? (Pause.) All right, all right. Good-bye.
There is a brief pause as ANN hangs up receiver, then comes out of kitchen.
Text 2
From An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestley, 1947
MRS BIRLING: What are you going to do?
BIRLING: Ring up the Chief Constable - Colonel Roberts.
MRS BIRLING: Careful what you say, dear.
BIRLING [now at telephone]: Of course. [At telephone] Brumley eight seven five
two. [To others as he waits] I was going to do this anyhow. I've had my suspicions all
along. [At telephone] Colonel Roberts, please. Mr Arthur Birling here. . . . Oh,
Roberts - Birling here. Sorry to ring you up so late, but can you tell me if an Inspector
Goole has joined your staff lately ... Goole. G-O-O-L-E ... a new man ... tall, cleanshaven. [Here he can describe the appearance of the actor playing the INSPECTOR.]
I see ... yes ... well, that settles it. . . . No, just a little argument we were having here....
Good night. [He puts down the telephone and looks at the others.]
Text 3
From Sleepless in Seattle, screenplay by Norah Ephron and Delia Ephron, 1992
INT. CAR - NIGHT
Annie driving. Presents on the front seat. She's singing "Sleigh
Ride" and doing all the sound effects and clipclops and giddyups.
After a moment, she realizes she doesn't know all the words and turns
81
on the radio.
DR. MARSHA'S FIELDSTONE'S VOICE
Welcome back to "You and Your Emotions." I'm Dr. Marcia Fieldstone
broadcasting across America from the top of the Sears Tower in
Chicago where we would have a fantastic view of Santa Claus and his
reindeer if there was a -- oops, never mind. Tonight we're talking
about wishes and dreams. What's your wishes this Christmas Eve? Maybe
the best presentyou can give yourself is a call to me. The number is
-ANNIE
Give me a break.
Annie changes the station.
RADIO VOICE
The subject of the evening's medical update is You and Your Spleen
and our host --She flips the dial back the other way.
DR. MARCIA FIELDSTONE (V.O.)
Our caller is from Seattle.
Annie changes the station.
RADIO VOICE
Coming up, Jingle Bells backwards, sung by the New Jersey Cape
Mayettes -Annie twists the dial back the other way. We hear a YOUNG BOY's
voice.
BOY'S VOICE (V.O.)
Hello, this is Jonah -- (there's a bleep as Jonah says his last
name)Annie's hand lingers on the dial.
DR. MARCIA FIELDSTONE (V.O.)
No last names, Jonah. Hello there, you sound younger than our usual
callers. How come you're up so late,
JONAH (V.O.)
It's not that late in Seattle.
DR. MARCIA FIELDSTONE (V.O.)
Got me there. What's your Christmas wish, Jonah?
Appendix - where to find out more
Books
Boardman, M (2004) The Language of Web sites, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-41532854-3
82
Crystal, D. (2004) A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, ISBN 0-7486-1982-8
Shortis, T. (2000) The Language of ICT, London: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-22275-3
Web sites
General
http://www.netting-it.com Investigating the Language of New Communication
Technologies
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs Marshall McLuhan - a Christian media
perspective
http://www.wired.com Kristen Philipkoski - The Web Not the Death of Language
Voice telephony
http://whitehousetapes.org Get recordings and text transcripts of telephone calls here
Text messaging
http://www.text.it Claims to be the only UK website dedicated to text messaging
http://www.textually.org All about texting, SMS and MMS
http://people.interaction-ivrea.it Mediating social relationship through mobile
communication within groups of teenage girls
Radio phone-ins
http://www.bbc.co.uk Use broadcasts of phone-ins to make transcripts
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/moneybox Get ready made transcripts of
phone-ins from Money Box here
E-mail and Internet messaging
http://sjsu.sjweb.net Online emotional discourse
Represented texts
http://www.script-o-rama.com Get film and TV scripts and transcripts here
83