The medium of Netspeak 41
be improved through the use of colloquial grammar and vocab-
ulary (especially ‘cool’ abbreviations, see p. 85) and a readiness
to introduce language play. But there is nothing one can do about
reaction signals. Addressing someone on the Internet is a bit like
having a telephone conversation in which a listener is giving you
no reactions at all: it is an uncomfortable and unnatural situation,
and in the absence of such feedback one’s own language becomes
more awkward than it might otherwise be.
Although Netspeak tries to be like speech, in its e-mail, chat-
group, and virtual world incarnations, it remains some distance
from it, in respect of several of spoken language’s most fundamen-
tal properties. One commentator has called it ‘metacommunicative
minimalism’, which he characterizes in this way:^25
Textual cyberspace filters away all qualities of a personal self save
the highly mediated, acutely self-conscious elements that appear
in written language. Phatic or metacommunicative cues, the
linguistic and paralinguistic signs that maintain cognizance of the
social relation between the sender and receiver of a message, are
drastically reduced in this medium.Table 2.3 is a summary of the seven characteristics of speech out-
lined in Table 2.1, applied to the Internet situations described in
my opening chapter. Notwithstanding the way netizens routinely
talk about their domain in terms which derive from everyday con-
versation, in my estimation the actual amount that Netspeak has
in common with speech is very limited. The Web is furthest away
from it; chatgroup and virtual world interactions are somewhat
closer to it; and e-mails sit uncertainly in the middle. The latter
three categories are certainly more speech-like than any other va-
riety of traditional writing; but the similarities are balanced, if not
outweighed, by the differences. So, if Netspeak does not display the
properties we would expect of speech, does it instead display the
properties we expect of writing?
Here too, the situation is not straightforward, as can be seen
from the analogous summary in Table 2.4. Let us consider first the
(^25) Millard (1996: 147).