The medium of Netspeak

Internet: electronic, global, interactive medium.

Each property has consequences on its language character.

The most important influence arises out of the electronic character.

User’s communicative options are constrained by the hardware needed in order to get Internet access.

Characters on the keyboard determines productive linguistic capacity.

Screen size and configuration determines receptive linguistic capacity.

Sender and receiver are linguistically constrained by the properties of the Internet software and hardware linking them.

the medium can facilitate some linguistic activities and there are activities that no other medium can achieve.

First of all it is necessary to know the limitations and facilitations of the medium.

An axiom of communication states:

Users should know the strengths and restrictions of the chosen medium, in relation to the uses they subject it to and the purposes they have in mind.

The evolution of Netspeak illustrates a real tension between the nature of the medium and the aims and expectations of its users.

The problem is its relationship to spoken and written language.

Some authors refers to the Internet language as “written speech”.

But how is it possible to write speech given a keyboard and a medium that disallows some features of conversation speech?

People talk in different ways, what kind of speech should be written down?

It is firstly important to be clear about differences between spoken and written language.

speech

• Time-bound, dynamic, transient. It is part of an interaction in which both participants are usually present, and the speaker has a particular addressee in mind.

• No time-lag between production and reception. The spontaneity and speed of the interaction make it difficult to plan it in advance. The pressure to think while talking promotes looser construction, repetition, comment clauses, etc. intonation and pauses divide long sentences into chunks, but sentence boundaries are unclear.

writing

• Space-bound, static, permanent. It’s the result of a situation in which the writer is usually distant from the reader, and often does not know who the reader is going to be.

• Time-lag between production and reception. Writers must anticipate its effects and the problems posed by having their language interpreted in different contexts. Writing allows closer analysis and allows careful organization and compact expression. Units of discourse are easy to identify through punctuation and layout.

speech

• Participants are usually in face-to-face interaction, so they can rely on extralinguistic cues (facial expression, gesture). The speech lexicon is usually vague, using words which refer to the situation (deictic expressions, that one, right now, etc.)

• Many words and constructions are characteristic of speech (contracted forms). Lengthy co-ordinated sentences are normal. There is nonsense vocabulary, obscenity, slang.

writing • Participants cannot rely on

context to make their meaning clear. There is no immediate feedback. Usually writers avoid the use of deictic expressions.

• Some words and constructions are characteristic of writing (long sentences, elaborately balanced syntactic patterns). Certain items of vocabulary are never spoken (chemical compounds).

speech

• Speech is very suited to social or “phatic” functions, or any situation where casual and unplanned discourse id desirable. It is good at expressing social relationships, personal attitudes.

• There is the possibility to rethink an utterance while the other person is listening, but errors, once spoken, cannot be withdrawn. Interruptions and overlapping speech are normal.

writing

• Writing is very suited to the recording of facts and the communication of ideas, and to tasks of memory and learning. Written records are easier to keep and scan, notes and lists provide mnemonics.

• Errors can be eliminated in later drafts without the reader ever knowing they were there. Interruptions, if they have occurred, are also invisible in the final product.

speech

• Unique features of speech include most of the prosody. Intonation, loudness, rhythm, pause, tones of voice cannot be written down with much efficiency.

writing

• Unique features of writing include pages, lines, capitalization, spatial organization, punctuation. Only a very few graphic conventions relate to prosody (question marks, italics). Several written genres (graphs, complex formulae) cannot be read aloud efficiently, but have to be assimilated visually.

Speech is time-bound, spontaneous, face-to-face, interactive, immediately revisable, loosely structured.

Writing is space-bound, contrived, elaborately structured, repeatedly revisable.

How does Netspeak stand, with reference to these characteristics?

Netspeak relies on characteristics belonging to speech and writing.

In many of its functions the Web is no different from traditional situations which use writing. Any attempt to identify the stylistic peculiarity of Web pages will need to deal with the same sort of visual and graphic matters as any other variety of written expression. Therefore we find a use of language which displays the general features of writing described above.

At the same time, some of the Web’s functions do bring it much closer to the kind of interaction more typical of speech. Web sites have got interactive facilities (e-mail, chatgroup). E-mails, chatgroups, though expressed through the medium of writing, display several characteristics of speech. They are time-governed, expecting or demanding immediate response, they are transient (e-mails can be immediately deleted or be lost to attention as they scroll off the screen - chatgroups). Their utterances display much of the energetic force which is characteristic of face-to-face conversation.

The situations are not all equally “spoken” in character. E-mails are written but chatgroups are for “chat”, and people “speak” to each other there as in virtual worlds.

But there are several differences between Netspeak and face-to-face conversation:

1) Lack of simultaneous feedback. Messages are complete and unidirectional. The message does not leave the computer until we send it. A complete message is transmitted at once and arrives at once.

The recipient cannot react to our message while we’re writing it and there is no way for a participant to get a sense of how successful a message is, while it is being written. The receiver cannot send an electronic equivalent of a simultaneous nod. Messages cannot overlap, recipients must experience a waiting period before the text appears.

2)The rhythm of an Internet interaction is much slower than that found in a speech situation, depending on many different elements (personal habits, computer access). Even if participants reply immediately, there may be a delay before the message reaches the other members’ screens (bandwidth processing problems, traffic density on the host computer).

Lags (time delays) cause problems.

A low lag is of the order of 2-3 seconds (significantly greater than that found in conversational exchanges).

Anything over 5 seconds will generate frustration, often prompting people to make remarks about the lag itself. The frustration is on both sides of the communication chain.

The larger the number of participants involved in an interaction, the worse the situation becomes. Delays in a conversation between 2 people are annoying but manageable. But in an electronic interaction between several people lag produces a different situation, because it interferes with a core feature of traditional face-to-face conversation, the conversational turn.

People take turns when they talk, it enables interaction to be successful and they expect “adjacent-pairs”, question-answer, compliant-excuse.

When there are long lags, the conversation becomes unusual and its ability to cope with a topic can be destroyed because the turn taking is dictated by the software, not by the participants. Messages are posted to a receiver’s screen linearly, in the order in which they are received by the system.

In a multi-user environment, messages are coming in from various sources all the time, and with different lags. Because of the way packets of information are sent, it is even possible for turn-taking reversals to take place.

The time-frames of the participants do not coincide (A sends a question. B replies and A sends another question. On the screen of C the second question arrives before the answer of B to the first).

The possibilities for confusion are enormous.

The number of overlapping interactions that a screen may display increases depending on the number of participants and the random nature of the lags.

The situation is at best confusing for an outsider.

Practiced participants seem to tolerate the anarchy which ensues.

Issues of feedback and turn-taking are ways in which Netspeak interaction differs from conversational speech.

But Netspeak has got other peculiarities that make it different from speech with respect to the formal properties of the medium.

Among these properties, it must be considered the domain of prosody and paralanguage (“it ain’t what you say but the way that you say it”).

In conversational speech there are variations in pitch, loudness, speed, rhythm, pause, tone of voice. Emoticons have been called “the paralanguage of the Internet”, but they are not the same in that they have to be consciously added to a text. In face-to-face communication someone may grin over several utterances, and the effect may be noted. In Netspeak an emoticon may be added to just one utterance, although the speaker may continue to feel the emotion over several turns.

There have been efforts to replace the prosody and paralanguage in the form of an exaggerated use of spelling and punctuation, use of capitals, spacing, special symbols for emphasis. Examples include repeated letters (aaaaaahhhhh, ooooops) Repeated punctuation marks (no more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) And some emphatic conventions (I SAID NO – all capitals for shouting, the *real* answer – word emphasis by asterisks).

These features can convey some meanings, but their range is small and restricted to gross notions such as extra emphasis, surprise, etc.

Less exaggerated nuances cannot be handled in this way and there is no system in the use of the marks.

There are signs of other characters used in order to express shades of meaning, but in the absence of agreed conventions it is difficult to know how to read such symbols.

To avoid confusion, participants in chatgroups use literary expressions in order to capture the range of emotions involved, using a graphic convention to distinguish the text from the rest of the conversation.

(<Hoppy giggles quietly to himself>, <Henry eyes Jane warily)

Anyway, people are aware of the ever present ambiguity when the prosody of speech is lacking.

Netspeak lacks the facial expressions, gestures and conventions of body posture and distance, fundamental in expressing personal opinions and attitudes.

This limitation was noted early in the development of Netspeak, that’s why smileys/emoticons have been introduced.

Smileys: keyboard characters designed to show an emotional facial expression. Almost all of them are read sideways.

The 2 basic types express positive and negative attitudes, but there are hundreds of sequences invented and collected in smiley dictionaries.

They are helpful but their semantic role is limited. They can forestall a misperception of a speaker’s intention, but a smiley still allows a huge number of readings.

If the user does not pay attention, they can lead to misunderstanding: adding a smile to an angry utterance can increase rather than decrease its force. Those who get into the habit of using smileys may find themselves in the position of having their unmarked utterances misinterpreted. Connery, talking about people who avoid flaming by using such abbreviations as IMHO (in my humble opinion), says that because of the authoritative nature of writing, within such anti-authoritarian conversations, the absence of cues could create problems because of the suspicion that the author is claiming to put forward a definitive answer.

However smileys are not especially frequent and some people do not use them at all. Most participants use only one or two basic types.

Furthermore, they have got other roles than disambiguation. Often they seem to have purely pragmatic force, a warning to the recipients that the sender is worried about the effect a written sentence may have.

The question is why emoticons have turned up now. Written language is always been ambiguous in absence of facial expressions and prosodic features of speech. Why did nobody ever introduce emoticons in written language?

Crystal believes that the answer must be something to do with the immediacy of Net interaction.

In traditional writing there is time to develop phrasing which makes personal attitudes clear. That’s why the formal conventions of letter-writing developed.

A Net message, lacking the usual courtesies, can appear rude, so a smiley can be useful.

Whatever their function, smileys are one of the most distinctive features of e-mail and chatgroup language.