Language and the Internet

70 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

 Develop an analytical ear for music.


 Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

These characteristics will obviously bias the recommendations of
the style guides. We respond to‘the voice of the quirky, individualist
writer’, say the authors ofWired Style, in expounding one of their
principles (see below), and they recommend: ‘play with voice’.
As hackers built the Internet and gave physical presence to its var-
ious situations, they have naturally developed a sense of ownership
of Netspeak which is reflected in the attitudes of the current genera-
tion of dictionaries and style guides. But the beast they have created
is now so large that it is beyond ownership. The hacker commu-
nity is but a tiny part of the online population, and the linguistic
intuitions and preferences of such vast numbers are immensely
variable and impossible to control. Quirky, individualist writers
there will be among them; but there will also be huge numbers of
non-quirky, conservative writers, who don’t read science fiction,
study Zen, or go in for wordplay. For every one hacker, there are
probably a thousand suits – and suits of many different linguistic
fabrics. The future of Netspeak, then, is very much bound up with
the extent to which hacker-originated language and style has de-
veloped a sufficiently stable and powerful identity to motivate new
Internet users to use it, or whether these users will introduce fresh
linguistic directions, evolving norms of stylistic usage which owe
nothing to hacker origins, and which avoid the playful and esoteric
features so much in evidence now. Although the linguistic features
described below are those which are currently in widespread use,
several of them figuring largely in Internet guides, any of them
could have a limited future.

Making the rules explicit

But this is to be looking well ahead. For the moment, the guides
and dictionaries have an important role introducing newbies to
the Internet, giving advice and instruction about how to behave if
they want their communications to be successful. Several general