Language and the Internet

The language of e-mail 125

The uniqueness of e-mail

Writers repeatedly draw analogies between e-mail and other forms
of communication, in order to locate it in communicative ‘space’.
It is:

a cross between a conversation and a letter, email is as fast as a

telegram and as cheap as a whisper^30

a telegraph, a memo, and a palaver rolled into one^31

faster than a speeding letter, cheaper than a phone call^32

a strange blend of writing and talking^33

Homer Simpson has it explained to him in this way:^34

Homer: What’s an e-mail?

Lenny: It’s a computer thing, like, er, an electric letter.

Carl: Or a quiet phone call.

From the above analysis, it is clear that e-mails do indeed have
elements of the memo about them, notably in their fixed header
structure. The informal letter analogy is also appropriate, with the
medium’s reliance on greetings and farewells, and the use of sev-
eral informal written features in the message body. The telephone
conversation analogy is also proper, given the way a dialogue style
can build up over time; and the cheapness of the medium has
often been remarked. And some e-mails are highly telegrammatic
in style. But e-mail, in the final analysis, is like none of these.
The consensus seems to be that it is, formally and functionally,
unique.
Functionally, e-mail does not duplicate what other mediums
can do. It is better than the telephone in eliminating what has been
called ‘telephone tag’ (in which people repeatedly leave messages

(^30) Hale and Scanlon (1999: 3). (^31) Hale and Scanlon (1999: 78).
(^32) Angell and Heslop (1994: 1); see also Hatch (1992). The similarity of electronic discourse
33 to the language of public interviews has also been noted (Collot and Belmore, 1993).
Naughton (1999: 143), who goes on to characterize it as resembling ‘stream-of-
34 consciousness narratives, the product of people typing as fast as they can think’.
‘The computer war menace shoes’, Episode 12A6 ofThe Simpsons(Fo xTV).