Language and the Internet PDF

52 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t they transcend the traditional limitations on textual dissemina- tion; and they have permeable boundaries (because of the way one text may be integrated within others or display links to others). Several of these...

52 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t they transcend the traditional limitations on textual dissemina- tion; and they have permeable boundaries (because of the way one text may be integrated within others or display links to others). Several of these properties have consequences for lan- guage, and these combine with those associated with speech and writing to make Netspeak a genuine ‘third medium’. Netspeak maxims How should we further characterize Netspeak, viewed as a novel medium combining spoken, written, and electronic properties? One method is to continue with the comparative approach used above. Several linguists and philosophers of language have investigated what counts as a ‘normal’ kind of conversation. The philosopher H. P. Grice is one, well known in pragmatics research for his four maxims of conversation that underlie the efficient co-operative use of language.34 They can be expressed as follows: The maxim of Quality Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. The maxim of Relevance Make your contributions relevant. The maxim of Quantity Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. The maxim of Manner Be perspicuous, and specifically: Avoid obscurity. 34 Grice (1975). For a general discussion, see Levinson (1983: ch. 3). The medium of Netspeak 53 Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. Be orderly. The point of an analysis of this kind is not to suggest that we always behave exactly according to the principles; common experience shows that we do not. But we do seem to tacitly recognize their role as a perspective or orientation within which actual utterances can be judged. For example, people who tell lies or make false claims can be challenged; if they talk too much they can be told (in so many words) to shut up; if they say something irrelevant, they can be asked to stick to the point; and if they fail to make themselves clear, they can be requested to say it again. The fact that we do all of these things indicates that we are bearing these maxims in mind. Moreover, if someone makes a remark that seems to flout these maxims, we instinctively look for ways to make sense of what has been said. If Joe asks ‘Where’s Uncle Kevin?’ and Jill replies ‘I expect there’s a dilapidated blue bicycle outside The Swan’, we do not criticize her for breaking all four maxims at once. Rather, we take it for granted that she is co- operating in the conversation, and that (a) she has good grounds from past experience for knowing that a bicycle will be outside The Swan at this time; (b) she knows the mention of a bicycle is relevant, because Uncle Kevin rides one; (c) she knows its attributes include being dilapidated and blue, and feels that the mention of both makes for a more vivid or jocular sentence than one which uses just one adjective or no adjective at all; and (d) she knows that Joe knows all this, so that her answer will be perfectly clear. In such ways, and by making such assumptions, we are able to make sense of all kinds of superficially bizarre contributions to conversations. It is not so easy to work out what is going on in the Internet world. Part of the difficulty arises out of the anonymity inherent in the electronic medium. This is not the first medium to allow spoken interaction between individuals who wish to remain anonymous, of course, as we know from the history of telephone 54 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t and amateur radio; but it is certainly unprecedented in the scale and range of situations in which people can hide their identity, especially in chatgroups and virtual worlds.35 These situations routinely contain individuals who are talking to each other under nicknames (nicks), which may be an assumed first name, a fan- tasy description (topdude, sexstar), or a mythical character or role (rockman, elfslayer) (see further, chapter 5). In e-mails, the per- sonal identity element (the part of the address found before the @) may be any of these, or simply a number or code, it then being up to the sender to decide what authentic signature the text of the e-mail will contain. The lexical structure and character of the names themselves is an important feature of Netspeak, of course; but there are other consequences for the type of language used. Operating behind a false persona seems to make people less inhibited: they may feel emboldened to talk more and in different ways from their real-world linguistic repertoire. They must also expect to receive messages from others who are likewise less inhibited, and be prepared for negative outcomes. There are obviously inherent risks in talking to someone we do not know, and instances of harassment, insulting or aggressive language, and subterfuge are legion. Questions about identity – of a kind which would be totally redundant in face-to-face settings – are also a feature of initial chatgroup encounters. Certain kinds of information are asked for and given, notably about location, age, and gender (not usually about race or socio-economic status). Gender is so sensitive an issue that it has given rise to the terms 35 The electronic traceability of messages, through server records, backups, and other monitoring procedures, might be thought enough to make anonymity impossible. As several commentators have said: never write anything that you wouldn’t want to see read out in court (e.g. Durusau, 1996) – see further below, p. 132. But tracing can be made extremely difficult in various ways, such as through using ‘anonymizers’ – services that combine encryption, pseudonyms, and proxy servers to let you browse and send messages anonymously, ‘remailer’ services which disguise where a message comes from, or free e-mail services which do not check the user’s personal details. There is no real way of knowing if an e-mail has been interfered with. Although the system is sufficiently abused (e.g. false or insulting messages sent out under someone’s name) that some organizations impose e-mail controls, the general problem does not seem to have affected the vast majority of users, who operate unconcernedly with their online personae. The medium of Netspeak 55 Morf [‘male or female’], an online query addressed to someone who uses a gender-ambiguous name (e.g. Chris, Hilary, Jan) and Sorg [‘straight or gay’]. People seem to become particularly anxious if they do not know the sex and sexual preference of the person they are talking to. Multiple and often conflicting notions of truth therefore co-exist in Internet situations, ranging from outright lying through mutually aware pretence to playful trickery. As Patricia Wallace puts it, referring to the absence of prosodic and kinesic clues in Netspeak: ‘The fact that it is so easy to lie and get away with it – as long as we can live with our own deceptions and the harm they may cause others – is a significant feature of the Internet.’36 It is of course possible to live out a lie or fantasy logically and consistently, and it is on this principle that the games in virtual worlds operate and the nicknamed people in chatgroups interact. But it is by no means easy to maintain a consistent presence through language in a world where multiple interactions are taking place under pressure, where participants are often changing their names and identities, and where the co- operative principle can be arbitrarily jettisoned. Putting this another way, when you see an Internet utterance, you often do not know how to take it, because you do not know what set of conversational principles it is obeying. Here are two such cir- cumstances, both of which undermine the maxim of quality. A spoof is any message whose origin is suspect; the sending of such messages, spoofing, is commonplace in some Internet situations. Unattributed utterances may be introduced into a virtual-world conversation, for example. Normally, each con- versational turn is preceded by the name of the player, along the lines of Mole says, ‘I’m hungry.’ But it is possible for a player to interpolate an utterance with no name preceding, such as: An angry lion appears in the doorway. Spoof utterances may also be inserted by the software, and not by any of the participants. When a spoof is noticed, the players may condemn it, question it, 36 Wallace (1999: 51). 56 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t or play about with it. The result can be a fresh element of fun injected into a game which is palling, with everybody knowing what is going on and willingly participating. Equally, because spoofing can confuse other players, and severely disrupt a game which is proceeding well, the various guides to manners in vir- tual worlds tend to be critical of it, and discourage it. Some groups insist on displaying the identity of the spoofer, such as by making the sender add his/her nick afterwards: 1,000 linguists have converged on Parliament – Doc.37 Because there is no way of knowing whether the content of a spoof is going to be true (with reference to the rest of the conversation) or false, such utterances introduce an element of anarchy into the co-operative ethos of conversation. A similar problem arises with trolling, the sending of a message (a troll) specifically intended to cause irritation to others, such as the members of a chatgroup. It is an innocent-sounding question or statement, delivered deadpan, and usually short, though some trolls are verbose in their apparent cluelessness. For example, somebody who wanted to troll a linguistics group might send the message I’ve heard that the Eskimo language has 1,000 words for snow – then sit back to enjoy the resulting explosions.38 The term derives from fishing (the trailing of a baited hook to see what bites), though it also captures the resonance of the trolls of Scandinavian mythology – the bridge-guarders who would let people pass only if they answered a question correctly. On the Internet, the bait is false information, deliberately introduced into a conversation to see who falls for it. People who respond, and correct the misinformation, show that they do not belong to the group, or are newcomers to it (newbies); old hands will simply ignore it, or – if they can be bothered – laconically send the response ‘nice troll’ to the originator, or YHBT [‘you have been trolled’] to the responder. Not all chatgroups troll; some insert clues to the existence of a troll into a message that only the 37 This is the procedure followed in Cherny’s group (Cherny 1999: 115). 38 For the reason, see Pullum and McCawley (1991). The medium of Netspeak 57 cognoscenti recognize; some are very much against the whole process, conscious of the communicative disruption that can result. The maxim of quantity is also often undermined in Internet situations. At one extreme there is lurking – a refusal to com- municate. Lurkers are people who access a chatgroup and read its messages but do not contribute to the discussion. The motives include newbie reluctance to be involved, academic curiosity (researching some aspect of Internet culture), or voyeurism. Some manuals refer to lurking as ‘spying’.39 Spamming refers to the sending of usually unwanted messages of excessive size. The origin of the term lies in a 1970 Monty Python sketch in which a cafe waitress describes the available dishes to two customers, and culinary variation is introduced by an increasing reliance on spam – ‘Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam... ’ – the whole interchange being accompanied, as one would expect, by the chanting of the same word from a passing group of Vikings.40 In one of those semantic shifts which makes etymology such a fascinating subject, the term was first applied to cases where a single message would be sent to many recipients, as when a company sends out an ad to everyone on a mailing list, producing electronic ‘junk-mail’. It later came to be used for the complementary situation – the sending of many messages to one user, as when a group of people electronically lobby a politician or attack a company’s policy.41 Either way, people find them- selves having to deal with quantities of unwanted text. 39 Lurking is not the same as idling, which is not an active attempt to hide one’s presence from the other members of a group – as when a participant decides to do something else while staying connected, or simply has nothing to say. A further label identifies smurfs and smurfettes – people who post messages to a group but without saying anything much. 40 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, BBC, 2nd series, episode 25 (15 December 1970). 41 A further distinction is the sending of many messages to a server in an attempt to shut it down – what is usually referred to as a mailbomb. The automatic deletion of spam mail is known as blackholing. 58 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t Not all spam is the same, either in intention or effect. Charles Stivale identifies three types common in virtual worlds: playful, pernicious, and ambiguous.42 Playful spamming occurs when visual or audio effects (such as a duck quacking) have been programmed to turn up in the text, unasked-for, at intervals within the game situation. It can also be found when one char- acter does something aggressively playful to another (a bonk – but not in the UK slang sense, please note),43 thereby eliciting a vociferous response. In some game situations (especially MOOs), several participants may simultaneously respond to a playful stimulus, producing a sequence of text messages on screen which come in so fast that they can hardly be read. Pernicious spam- ming refers to the Internet equivalent of real-life harassment, often involving sexually explicit language and description of actions, and usually prompting the introduction of control measures of some kind by the group moderators. Lengthy aggressive utterances (flaming – see below) are often involved. Ambiguous spamming falls between these extremes. A participant might repeatedly send a message which irritates other players, or cause another player to do something unlooked-for (e.g. Sting throws Moog out of the plane) or be sent to another ‘room’ in the game (such as ‘Prison’). The ambiguity lies in the fact that the intention behind the spam may be unclear, and the effect var- iously unpredictable. What counts as spam is often a matter of taste; as Marvin puts it: ‘one participant’s spam is another’s entertainment’.44 But in all cases, spamming is a gratuitous addition to the communicative exchange, and thus breaks the maxim of quantity. Flaming differs from spamming, in that messages (flames) are always aggressive, related to a specific topic, and directed at an individual recipient (spamming, by contrast, is often ludic or 42 Stivale (1996). 43 As The New Penguin English dictionary (2000) intriguingly puts it: ‘bonk, verb trans informal 2 Brit to have sexual intercourse with (somebody)’. 44 Marvin (1996: 9). The subjectivity of the notion is also noted by Cherny (1999: 75) who refers to Marvin and observes, ‘party conversation that appears witty and fun to one person is annoying spam to another’. The medium of Netspeak 59 emotionally neutral, unspecific in content, and aimed at anyone within ‘earshot’). It is similar in some ways to the ritual verbal duelling encountered between rival gangs and opposing army generals.45 However, there is considerable dispute over what counts as a flame, and why people do it. People’s sensitivities, tastes, communicative preferences, and styles differ – as they do in everyday conversation, indeed, where it is also not always agreed between two parties whether they are ‘arguing’ or ‘having a discussion’, or why an argument has blown up. Curiously, the two chatgroup parties involved in a flame often do not see their interchange as flaming, though other participants in the group do. Parties who have had their flaming pointed out to them are often surprised at the level of their linguistic aggressiveness – a function, presumably, of flamers finding themselves at a safe and often anonymous electronic distance from each other.46 Cultural differences intervene, especially when messages are being exchanged internationally, so that an observation which might seem totally innocent to a sender in country A might seem inexplicably rude to a receiver in country B. Also, it often takes time for a series of exchanges to develop from a mild disagree- ment into an antagonistic interchange, and it can be difficult to identify the point when this happens. Plainly, an exchange in which participants have stopped talking about their topic and are simply exchanging verbal abuse would be a clear flame; but it is more debatable whether aggressive argument (of the kind com- mon enough in much academic and political debate), continuing to focus on the topic, albeit rudely, is flaming or not. The point has attracted considerable discussion within chatgroups (where flaming behaviour is common, at least by comparison with e-mail).47 William Millard reports a case where a discussion moved to a different level, involving a dispute over whether a 45 For examples, see Crystal (1997a: 60). 46 In one study, the members of anonymous groups made six times more hostile remarks than the members of non-anonymous ones: Wallace (1999: 125). 47 Baron (2000: 239) finds a diminution in e-mail flaming, and suggests that the behaviour may have been an early symptom of the novelty of the medium. For a discussion of politeness strategies in relation to Netspeak, see Maricic (2005). 60 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t message was a flame or not, thereby attracting the attention of the list moderator, who attempted to control the way the interaction was going: The message below is not a flame, although the poster claims it is. I have noticed on lists that when anyone uses the word ‘flame’ in a post hitherto dormant netters gather for the kill from all parts of the known electronic universe. Don’t overreact here... 48 Ironically, such interventions can lead to a further discussion of what constitutes flaming, in which people take strong positions, and end up flaming each other about the topic of flaming – what Millard calls metaflaming. Flaming behaviour, arising as it does out of frustration over the way a conversation is going, would seem more to contravene Grice’s maxim of manner than of quantity. Its presence in Netspeak should not be underestimated. Millard, focusing on academic lists, identifies several factors in Internet writing which account for it. In addition to the metacommunicative minim- alism of the medium, referred to above (p. 44), there is also: the customary economic constraints on connection time (and thus on personal patience), the delayed response of the audience, or the uncertainties ensuing from the consciousness that Internet communities are new enough to lack clear social protocols – as well as the general underlying tension between conceptions of language as a transparent medium for serious work or a dense material for ludic performance – all of which, he concludes, ‘implies that online academic writing as a genre is conducive to anxiety, wrath, and vendetta’.49 The point goes well beyond the academic. Some groups have even gone so far as to experiment with flame filters, which search a message for potential inflammatory words or phrases (e.g. get þ lost/real/with it/a life; you þ noun) and automatically exclude them. But the investigation of the formal linguistic equivalents of this particular genre of communicative competence is too 48 49 Millard (1996: 152–3). Millard (1996: 147). The medium of Netspeak 61 rudimentary for such procedures to be reliable – both in what they exclude and fail to exclude. Rather more useful are such features as the ‘scribble’ command (used on the virtual com- munity known as The WELL [‘Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’]: p. 135), which allows senders to delete what they have sent, inserting in its place. The maxim of manner is also seriously challenged by the way some Internet situations operate. Will contributions be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity? Brevity is certainly a recognized desideratum in many Netspeak interactions, in terms of sentence length, the number of sentences in a turn, or the amount of text on a screen. Style manuals repeatedly exhort users to be brief (p. 79); and while there are several signs of brevity in the different Internet situations, especially in instant messaging, it takes only a short exposure to the Web to find many instances where the principle is honoured more in the breach than the observance. Bloggers, in particular, routinely disregard it. Also, web page designers constantly talk about the importance of ‘clear navigation’ around a page, between pages in a site, and between sites, with the aim of providing unproblematic access to sites, clear screen layouts, and smoothly functioning selection options (for searching, help, further information, etc.). But the inevitable amateurishness of many web pages (the cost of designing a high-quality website can be considerable) means that the manner maxim is repeatedly bro- ken. In synchronous chatgroups, the challenge is much more fundamental; there is an extraordinary degree of disorder, chiefly due to the number of participants all speaking at once, which makes a transcript of an interaction extremely difficult to follow. An interesting question is the extent to which obscurity and ambiguity is more likely in Netspeak because of the dependency of the medium upon typed input. Typing, not a natural beha- viour, imposes a strong pressure on the sender to be selective in what is said, especially if one is not a very fast or competent typist. And selectivity in expression must lead to all kinds of unclarity. 62 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t Fourthly, the maxim of relevance – that contributions should clearly relate to the purpose of the exchange – is also undermined in some Internet situations. What is the purpose of an Internet exchange, one might well ask? In some cases, it is possible to define the purpose quite easily – a search for information on a specific topic on the Web, for example, or the desire to score points in a fantasy game. In others, several purposes can be present simultaneously, such as an e-mail which combines informational, social, and ludic functions. But in many cases, it is not easy to work out what the purpose of the exchange is. People often seem to post messages not in a spirit of real communica- tion but just to demonstrate their electronic presence to other members of a group, to ‘leave their mark’ for the world to see (in the spirit of graffiti), or to use the medium to help themselves think something out.50 The extreme situation is found in many chatgroups, where from the amount of topic-shifting we might well conclude that no subject-matter could ever be irrelevant. Informal conversation has long been recognized for its relative randomness of subject-matter;51 but identifying the threads of subject-matter in a spoken dialogue is simplicity itself compared with the nature of the exchanges in such chatgroups, where several topics are being discussed at once, participants are interpolating comments about the way the conversation is going, and irrelevant utterances are being routinely introduced (as in the case of spoofing) for ludic or other reasons. The notion of relevance is usually related to an ideational or content-based function of language; but here we seem to have a situation where content is not privileged, and where factors of a social kind are given precedence. The social function of much Internet communication has been a major theme of the literature in recent years, especially with reference to the concept of a ‘virtual community’. This notion 50 This enhancing feature of the medium is illustrated by the finding that electronic group brainstorming seems to work better than its face-to-face counterpart: Wallace (1999: 84). 51 Crystal and Davy (1969: ch. 1). The medium of Netspeak 63 has been not a little contentious, with some considering it an empty phrase, and others trying to give it a meaningful defini- tion. Certainly, the mere fact of having engaged in an Internet activity does not produce in a user the sort of sense of identity and belonging which accompanies the term community. On the other hand, some Internet situations do promote such a sense of belonging, which comes from ‘the experience of sharing with unseen others a space of communication’.52 Underlying this view is a broader issue, to do with the way the Internet has come to be used in practice. To summarize a complex debate (in a netshell, perhaps): the Internet is not as global a medium as it might at first appear to be. While in principle much has been made of its ability to transcend the limitations of physical environments, cultural differences, and time-zones, thereby allowing people from anywhere to communicate with people anywhere else about anything at all, in practice the types of communication which take place are much more restricted and parochial. Most Internet interactions are not global in character; we are not talking to millions when we construct our web pages, send an e-mail or instant message, join a chatgroup, blog, or enter a virtual world. Derek Foster, summarizing a paper on computer-mediated communication (CMC) by Garth Graham, comments: ‘The interactivity of CMC is about human connections. It is about talking. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audi- ences.’53 Howard Rheingold describes the Internet as an ‘eco- system’ of subcultures.54 And Patricia Wallace identifies purpose as much more important than geography: Though I like the ‘global village’ metaphor, the Internet is not really like that most of the time. With respect to human interaction, it is more like a huge collection of distinct neighborhoods where people with common interests can share information, work together, tell stories, joke around, debate politics, help each other out, or play games.55 52 53 54 Wilbur (1996: 13). Foster (1996: 29). Rheingold (1993: 3). 55 Wallace (1999: 9). 64 l a n g u ag e a n d th e i n t e r n e t Internet users are evidently wanting to talk to others who belong to their interest group (subculture, elite, niche... ) or whom they would like to influence so that they become part of their interest group. Indicative is the way group members typically use such labels as ‘guests’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘foreigners’ when referring to visitors to their forum. The more light-hearted accounts go even further. Andy Ihnatko, for example, characterizes the situation in this way: the true purpose of language is to reenforce the divisions between society’s tribes, or at least to make things difficult enough to understand so that the riff-raff keeps out. The new language of the Internet, spoken by a great number of rather insular types who like to keep interpersonal contact to a bare minimum to begin with, is no exception.56 Sociological analysis now seems to be moving away from the view that the kind of reduced social cues described earlier dis- allow the development of complex social and personal relation- ships on the Net. Just because we use a restricted set of graphic characters does not stop people constructing a new social world, and some have argued that cyberspace in certain conditions permits considerable levels of sophistication.57 Interesting linguistic questions follow. If real Internet com- munities are relatively small-scale, they will demonstrate their solidarity by evolving (consciously or unconsciously) measures of identity, some of which will be non-linguistic (e.g. shared knowledge, a particular morality) and some linguistic in char- acter. The linguistic features will take time to evolve, especially in a medium where technological facilities change so quickly and where some degree of nonconformity is commonplace among users, but eventually they will provide the community with an occupational dialect which newcomers will have to learn if they wish to join it. Linguistic idiosyncrasies belonging to individual chatgroups and MUDs have often been noted, at least as anec- dotal observations. One of the aims of what one day might be 56 57 Ihnatko (1997: iii). See the review in Paccagnella (1997). The medium of Netspeak 65 called Internet sociolinguistics (or dialectology) will be to determine just how systematic such features are and how many such dialects can be distinguished. An initial enquiry into each of the main Internet situations provides the subject-matter of chapters 4–8. However, it is also likely, given the constraints that come from everyone using a broadly similar computer technol- ogy and having a broadly similar set of motivations, that there will be a set of shared linguistic features, found regardless of the Internet situation. The extent to which such a ‘common core’ exists is the subject of chapter 3.