Language and the Internet

(Axel Boer) #1

The medium of Netspeak 57


goes well beyond the academic. Some groups have even gone so
far as to experiment with flame filters, which search a message for
potential inflammatory words or phrases (e.g.get+lost/real/with
it/life; you+noun) and automatically exclude them. But the in-
vestigation of the formal linguistic equivalents of this particular
genre of communicative competence is too rudimentary for such
procedures to be reliable – both in what they exclude and fail to
exclude. Rather more useful are such features as the ‘scribble’ com-
mand(usedonthevirtualcommunityknownasTheWell=‘Whole
Earth ’Lectronic Link’: p. 130), which allows senders to delete what
they have sent, insertingin its place.
The maxim of manner is also seriously challenged by the way
some Internet situations operate. Will contributions be orderly
and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity? Brevity is certainly
a recognized desideratum in all Netspeak interactions, in terms
of sentence length, the number of sentences in a turn, or the
amount of text on a screen. Style manuals repeatedly exhort users
to be brief (p. 74); and while there are several signs of brevity in
the different Internet situations, it takes only a short exposure to
the Web to find many instances where the principle is honoured
more in the breach than the observance. Also, Web page designers
constantly talk about the importance of ‘clear navigation’ around
a page, between pages in a site, and between sites, with the aim of
providing unproblematic access to sites, clear screen layouts, and
smoothly functioning selection options (for searching, help, fur-
ther information, etc). But the inevitable amateurishness of many
Webpages(thecostofdesigningahigh-qualityWebsitecanbecon-
siderable) means that the manner maxim is repeatedly broken. In
synchronous chatgroups, the challenge is much more fundamental;
there is an extraordinary degree of disorder, chiefly due to the num-
ber of participants all speaking at once, which makes a transcript
of an interaction extremely difficult to follow. An interesting ques-
tion is the extent to which obscurity and ambiguity is more likely
in Netspeak because of the dependency of the medium upon typed
input. Typing, not a natural behaviour, imposes a strong pressure
on the sender to be selective in what is said, especially if one is not

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