So this week I didn’t have any Internet. Not only was it uncomfortable to be sitting in my room, wondering what to do, but I also found that a) my inbox was overflowing and b) I spent a lot more time talking to people. Which got me thinking about the idea of language as a medium. (because that’s what I do) I suppose part of my linguistic mind has always realized that language is a medium, and were I sitting in my Syntax class, the answer would come to my mind immediately. However, for some reason, I have always thought of the Internet as being above or outside of language. A silly idea, given that the Internet is really just an explosion of language available to everyone. But it was curious to me that I seemed to view language as the opposite of technology. Part of me views technology as a decline of the English language, like I’m some sort of linguistic purist stuck in time. But language is the ultimate technology. It’s always changing, being updated and revised, bugs being fixed.
My Week without the Internet
This was written by shelby. Posted on Tuesday, February 3, 2009, at 9:50 am. Filed under Linguistics. Tagged baylor_nms_s09, Linguistics. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
2 Comments
I see what you’re getting at. I also think the internet is making us all inherently A.D.D.
Before the internet, humans concentrated on one convo/writings at a time–now with the internet we could be e-mailing, instant messaging, commenting on facebook, and browsing the net all at once. Perhaps this decline in language is due to the fact that our attention is being smeared across several different attentions…and our language has a capacity, and we’re smearing it thin…
Though I can’t be sure precisely what you’re referring to, IMHO internet/texting abbreviations aren’t a butchery of language and are often just a faster and more efficient way of communicating something. There are a lot of people who can’t spell or use proper grammar on the internet but I don’t know that this is different from normal writing – the difference is that incompetent writers don’t normally get their unchecked writings published for the world to see. Having proofread a fair number of essays in school, including at the college level, I think that there are a lot of people who just don’t have the knack for written language and really do struggle with it – and on the internet, I think these people tend not to try very hard to improve, again as a result of the internet disinhibition effect. I’m a moderator for an internet messageboard, and as somebody who is bothered by minor grammatical infractions, it is amazing to me how people will post something that is almost entirely undecipherable and expect others to understand it. Then again, on the internet it’s not always a given that English is the writer’s first language.