All material copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. or its licensors. All rights reserved.The brave new world of cyberlanguage
It was inevitable, Jamie Reid says, that his love letters and his dinner-table chats would show the effect.
Reid, 23, is what you might call a paid hacker -- a self-taught network security expert, hired by a desperate corporate world right out of his Toronto high school. He lives totally immersed in the Internet world -- and he knows it shows.
"You begin to look at things in a very logical and inductive way after working with machines for a long time," he says. "You rely less on intuition. The problems that computers solve have few variables; things add up. And you apply those same ways of doing things to your everyday life. It only makes sense that people who spend their days dealing with those sort of questions would attempt to quantize everything from their shopping lists to their politics."
In truth, Reid didn't say that, he wrote it. As if to illustrate his own point, he offered that observation via e-mail a couple of hours after I put the question to him in a conversation. His reply, articulate and eloquent, was also a textbook example of many of the other ways in which the Internet is changing the way we use language. He wrote in one-sentence paragraphs. He listed points. He used mathematical jargon ("quantize") in an everyday context. About the only thing he didn't do was toy with capitaLetters.
It's all dot-com and network and i-this and e-that, these days, and so ubiquitous are these words and symbols that we don't tend to give them much thought. But in many subtle ways the Internet is dramatically altering the way we use language: How we write, how we speak, how we use words when we think.
"It was inevitable that our language would be affected because the Internet is not simply a technical phenomenon, it's a cultural phenomenon, and it doesn't even matter if you're on it or not, you are nonetheless affected by its presence in the culture."
So says Liss Jeffrey, adjunct professor at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and director of the byDesign eLab, an electronic lab engaged in the design of public space on-line. "New horizons open up and we, as human beings, have to find ways to describe those places. We create new things, we dream them up, and then we find ways to talk about them."
Take cyberspace. It's now a universally accepted idea that most of us spend part of each day there. We all know what it means. The term was coined by William Gibson in 1984; it is, Jeffrey says, something people have experiences of, an interactive participatory reality, and thus something for which we needed words.
There have been lots of other new words in the six years most of us have been visiting cyberspace. The Internet was invented in 1969, but didn't have public use until the early 1990s. The explosion came in early 1995, as service providers switched to flat-rate billing, instead of charging for volume of mail received. The 1994 edition of the Canadian Internet Handbook included two pages on the World Wide Web, predicting it might one day come into widespread use. A Nielsen survey found that in 1996, 23 per cent of Canadians used the Internet; a year later, it was 31 per cent. Angus Reid found 55 per cent of us using it in 1999 and says this year, the number is up to 70 per cent.
But while much of the cultural analysis of the Internet is about the Web, Clive Thompson, editor-at-large at Shift magazine in New York, says the most significant factor has been e-mail, however pedestrian it may seem. "It's had by far the most immediate effects and more visceral effect," he says. "When people get to work, do they look at a groovy new site, or watch some streaming video, or something with generation-enhanced Flash content? Of course not. They check their e-mail."
And the often-overlooked result of our addiction to e-mail is that we write more. Much more.
"Before e-mail, the vast majority of people never wrote anything," Thompson says. "Their jobs didn't require it, their pastimes didn't require it, and it wasn't easy to do -- before computers we didn't write a lot of text." Now people have a motive: "It's not that people want to write, but they want to talk to other people, and they have to write to do that."
But how are they writing?
Well, in English, for one thing. There has been an explosion in the number of people for whom English is a second language, even as the number of native speakers of English has steadily declined over the last 10 years. "English is changing its function in the world," says Eric McLuhan, author of Electric Language, adding that English, as the language with the greatest flexibility and largest vocabulary, was the only language prepared for this shift.
But McLuhan, who is the son of the legendary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, says the 15 years of the computing era have had drastic effects on the building blocks of writing.
Attention spans have declined sharply, and with them, sentence length. Twenty years ago, the average sentence length in a novel was 20 words; today it is 12 to 14 words. In mass-market books such as Harlequin Romance novels, the average sentence is only seven or eight words.
Paragraphs, too, have changed. Most prominently, one-sentence paragraphs have become ubiquitous. That means, McLuhan says, that the traditional one-sentence paragraph has lost its role of transition or dramatic impact. In addition, he says, ideas are no longer developed in paragraphs. And all objective distance is lost. "It's all up front and in your face. That makes for high [reader] involvement and low detachment."
And the style of bullet-point writing, also a function of Internet communication, results in a compressed, discontinued presentation of information, heavy with parallelism -- qualities once reserved for poetry, McLuhan observes. "We are reinventing poetics from the bottom up."
Robert Logan says all this should come as no surprise. A physicist at the University of Toronto and the author of The Sixth Language , he uses chaos theory to argue that each time human society needs to deal with an information overload, a new language emerges. "Speech, writing, math, science, computing and the Internet form an evolutionary chain of languages," he says. Writing and math emerged in 3300 BC in Sumer to keep track of tributes; then came science because of the need to teach how to organize that knowledge. Computing allowed people to organize the explosion of knowledge, and then, when everyone wanted to communicate with computers, the Internet emerged.
"To communicate, to operate in the 21st century, you must be fluent in all six languages," says Logan, adding, "You can speak some with an accent."
Each language has its own grammar and syntax, evolving with the vestigial structures of its predecessors. When writing emerged, it took the vocabulary of speech but added new words. Plato's Greek has many more words and grammatical structures than Homer's. With math came the grammar of logic; with science, the grammar of the scientific method; with the Internet, the grammar of hypertext and search engines.
This is, in Logan's mind, the key contribution of the Internet era: We write, speak and think in hypertext -- the code in which text is written on the web -- the links. It is tangential, not sequential.
"I am much more hypertext in my talking now," says Logan. "I jump off into something else, then return to where I was, to what I was talking about." It is the verbal equivalent of clicking on a blue-underlined link.
Reid hears something else, when his "geek" friends and colleagues are talking. "Knowledge is what's valued in this industry, and that's how people speak," he says. "There's a rapid-fire passing back and forth of facts, it's almost like a pissing contest, in the way it sounds. But it's just exchanging knowledge. There's no wisdom or value attached."
Jargon, of course, be it mathematical, scientific, computer-specific, has crept into everyday speech. Jeffrey calls it the democratizing of expert knowledge. And Thompson notes the binary influence on the spoken English of people who use programming languages. Take the use by geeks of "non" -- as in the dry observation that a total system crash is a "non-trivial problem."
He also argues that the style of discourse has also fundamentally changed.
"E-mail created an entirely new style of argument and discussion," he says, referring to the cut-and-paste back-and-forth. He compares it to the passing back and forth of illuminated manuscripts between medieval monks, who left wide margins for each other's comments -- only that process took years. "This is: Here's what you said right back at you. You can't get away from your words."
Credit: The Globe and Mail
