The Effect of the Internet on Language and Communication

:This article is about the effect of the internet on language, put together by four classmates at James Madison University for a project in their 'technology and writing' class. The ideas expressed here are culminated from a list of many readings which can be found below.

As long as humans have existed and communicated with each other, they have strived to enhance the methods of doing so. The inventions of the printing press, the telegraph, and the telephone each demonstrate a landmark improvement in long-distance, instantaneous communication. On January 1, 1983, however, the National Science Foundation created the first TCP/IP connection, joining together universities across the United States. Many consider this date to be birth of the Internet, forever changing the way people communicate across the globe. Throughout its more than twenty years of existence, the internet has seen and orchestrated many differences in the way people communicate, including the language they use, the style with which they write, the way they learn new languages, and the format in which they write. In particular, the new media of e-mail, instant messenger programs, and blogging, have greatly affected the way messages are presented and read, introducing new, looser confines of formality, a generally-accepted flexibility in spelling and grammar, and the notion of writing and reading in a nonlinear context. Also, with programs such as Rosetta Stone, Word 2 Word, and Babelfish, a myriad of websites on foreign language help, and instant “translate” buttons with which many internet browsers are equipped, the difficulty of communicating with someone who speaks a foreign language is overcome in many different ways. Naturally, each of these notions brings with it both pros and cons, and many of these will be touched on below.

Specific media

The internet has introduced many ways to communicate online, which have greatly affected the languages and styles we use to communicate. Among these media are e-mail, instant messaging, and blogging.

E-mail

E-mail allows the transmission of messages so efficiently that the nickname of "snail mail" was given to the traditional postal system, now mainly used for parcels. For the purpose of communicating with friends and family informal notes and letters have been all but replaced by e-mail. The efficient transfer of e-mails has also created the expectation of equally efficient replies. To further increase efficiency, e-mail messages tend to be terse and informal compared to postal letters.

Instant messaging

Originally launched for Macintosh computers in 1989 and expanded to DOS and personal computers by 1993, America Online offered customers online games for an hourly fee, as well as chat rooms of different sizes and subjects where members could enter and type to other members, holding a conversation by means of reading and writing instead of hearing and speaking. Both the video game format and the chat rooms would remain, but they soon gave way in popularity to AOL’s Instant Messaging (AIM) field. Here, members could add other members as friends and put them on a buddy list, and then talk with them one-on-one in real time. Since then, the company and program has dropped its full name and simply goes by the acronym, AOL, but its popularity has also peaked. Instead, a separate program of its AIM software has become popular.

Being able to type to friends at real time has vastly changed the language of every country in which AIM exists. In order to quickly produce a message to be read, typing had to improve, shortcuts had to be found, and rules had to be lifted. It is the abbreviations, internet slang, and loosened grammar rules that have affected languages so greatly. Perhaps the most popular and widely-known internet slang is that which is used to indicate laughter, lol, or “laughing out loud.” This is, however, just one of hundreds of abbreviations in common usage online today. If one is unaware of their meaning, many online conversations would appear to be in a foreign language. The loosened rules of spelling and grammar have also greatly influenced language. Being more focused on the content and subject and having to respond as quickly as possible to friends online has allowed for very common misspellings of words to become acceptable if the message still pulls through. Also, an entire new alphabet, known as leet, or 1337, has been created. Short for “elite,” this alphabet rewrites words using numbers and symbols that resemble the shapes of the letters in the English alphabet. Although this alphabet is more prevalent in online video games, it is making its way into AIM and other online instant message devices as well.

Blogging

In the mid 1990s, various people started writing their journals and diaries online, publishing them not only for personal use, but placing them in the public domain. This small and simple notion, known as blogging (blog being short for “web log”), has grown to become one of the Internet’s most popular and powerful forms of communication. Blogging is now a main attraction of the internet, and is used for journals, political polls, news reports, photo albums, travelogues, and a general respository of information and opinions. Keeping a blog affects language similarly to how keeping a journal affects language: it invokes practice. As opposed to instant messaging, blogging has no time restraints, therefore the common slang found in instant messaging is not as prevalent in blogs. Instead, people practice their writing and reading skills using a language that is more grammatically correct. Another important aspect to consider, however, is the legal ramifications of putting explicit descriptions of one’s life into the public domain. As the popularity of blogging has increased, so have cases of libel. For instance, employees have been fired for discussing their employers in blogs.

Netiquette and second languages

One of the major issues surrounding current internet technology is the lack of paralinguistic tools available to online users. This becomes particularly apparent when studying the online communication of users that are using English despite the fact that it is not their native language. In one of the first studies done of non-native speakers communicating in their second language, Hartford and Bardvi-Harglig compared the email communications of native and non native speakers in various graduate programs. They discovered that in non-native speaker’s emails there was an overall lack of socio-culturally accepted guidelines. This is most likely due to the fact that online communication requires more than simply language proficiency. It requires users to have an intimate sense of not only how language is used but also to have a sense of the culturally accepted standards of that language that many native speakers are still not aware of.

The fact that not all native speakers have been apprised of the etiquette required on the web can bee seen in the numerous web pages and texts devoted to the subject. So called Netiquette is the umbrella term used to describe the rules and policies to follow while online. For example, typing in all capital letters represents shouting, and most users believe it should be avoided for long passages. While some rules appear to be obvious there are others that are far more intricate, such as the fact that while netiquette does not discourage flaming (heated online messages) it does discourage flame wars (repeated, back and forth flaming). In addition, although the web appears to be developing its own set of rules, many traditional rules of etiquette are also being upheld concurrently.

It is obvious that these newly-presented rules would present challenges to a non-native speaker. Whereas most native speakers are at least moderately aware of social norms and etiquette, it is much more difficult for non-native speakers to pick up on these idiosyncratic rules. This can be seen in many of the studies done on non-native speakers’ e-mail communication. Generally speaking, non-native speakers were far more likely to use want statements over query preparatory (terms in a study by Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). It’s that simple, and it makes learning other languages almost unnecessary in a limited capacity. The point must then be considered: is this a great tool for those who are looking for a quick translation for understanding purposes, or a way for students to skirt the requirement to actually comprehend foreign language and their corresponding words and phrases in their native tongue? This is a very accessible, easy-to-use free tool that many sites offer, which means it takes nothing for a person to search the web instead of actually studying another language and beginning to understand it. In this way, technology has changed the speed and accessibility of translations and made it nearly unnecessary for an individual to study and understand the nuances of other languages.

Obviously, online tools geared towards making it simpler to learn"Word 2 Word"/> and translate"Babel Fish"/> other languages offers benefits and problems to the study of language. Their speed and accessibility make it simple for someone who is finding him- or herself in a time constraint of sorts and needs to rapidly understand a foreign tongue. However, it seems to take the comprehension and research portions of other cultures’ languages out of the equation. While the reality of these tools is that they are not going to go away, it is important to note that the use of them can sometimes stunt the growth of someone trying to truly understand another written or spoken word.

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