240 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
using the Web, such as by publishing work there in instalments,
collaborating in creative writing, and allowing users to influence
the direction in which a story goes.^26 Editors are producing collab-
orative critical editions of texts and oeuvres.^27 Digital artists are ex-
ploiting the graphic properties of the medium to produce pictorial
and pictographic works of ‘ASCII art’.^28 There is evidence of a fresh
interest in the visual properties of letters and other symbols, and
in exploiting the potential of the software to present typograph-
ical variation. The creativity can be seen even in very restricted
linguistic domains of Net activity, such as naming. The apparently
straightforwardissueofe-addresseshasprovedtobeaworldofcon-
siderable complexity, because the enormous expansion of the Net,
and the limited number of ‘ordinary words’ available for names,
has forced individuals as well as companies to be highly creative
in their naming practices (p. 159).^29 The creativity, moreover, is
moving in unexpected directions. With so much emphasis on the
way the Net promotes global interaction and shared knowledge, it
comes as a surprise to note that increasing numbers of Net-users
donotwant to interact globally or share information. On the con-
trary, they want to protect their knowledge, and their privacy. We
have already devised barriers to stop undesired interruptions in the
senior communication services – ex-directory telephone numbers,
for example. Attention is now being paid to developing similar
protective measures in Netspeak, such as filters for e-mail spam
(p. 53) and increasingly sophisticated measures of encryption. This
too has its linguistic dimension.
As I said in my Preface, I wrote this book because I wanted to
find out about the Internet and its effect on language, and could
(^26) See the hypertext journal of creative writing,Kairoshttp://english.ttu.edu/kairos; also
27 Deegan (2000: 7), Sutherland (1997).
28 For example, ofBeowulf,Canterbury tales, Wittgenstein: see Deegan (2000: 8).
Several other artistic projects have explored new cyber-uses of language. For example,
Nick Crowe’s ‘New Medium’ (2000) is a series of fifteen glass panels functioning as
memorial sites, each with a hand-engraved loving message to a deceased person. Alicia
Felberbaum’s ‘Textures of memory: the poetics of cloth’ (2000) uses weaving to reflect
29 the evolving language of the Internet.
See Koizumi (2000), who advises companies looking for a name to avoid diacritics, long
names, and trendy contractions and spellings (cf. p. 22).