Not with a bang but a twitter
Dr Neil James is executive director of the Plain English Foundation and the author of Writing at Work. A version of this article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, May 17 2010.
BTW, I was trying to hashtag an RT, but I fat-fingered the text and ended up detweeting instead. Not exactly ROTFL. |
If reading that text just induced alarm for the future of English, you aren't alone. The e-language of instant messaging, mobile text, email and Twitter has no shortage of detractors.
The textual revolution is blamed for a wide range of evils, from destroying the beauty of English and dumbing down public debate to dampening the brain development of our young. But when we sift through the rhetoric of panic, there is little evidence to justify these claims.
New verbs+
Let's start with the obvious. As with all new technology, e-media has generated its own world of words. Its very brand names are hardwired into e-language, to the point that we google and tweet as verbs. This alone is enough for the preservers of English purity to suspect the revolution is at the door.
What mostly gets the purists going is text language – the short forms used in instant messaging (IM) and short message services (SMS). The most prominent textual targets are the abbreviations used for the physical convenience of the fingers, like GR8, cu l8r, or LOL. Punctuation emoticons such as ;-) or :-( are particularly maligned.
Then there are the acronyms. Some of them are for teenage convenience, like PAW (parents are watching), but they also include the whimsical ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing), the polite PMFJIB (pardon me for jumping in but), and the expressive MUSM (miss you so much).
Fact or fiction?
But do these forms really represent a textual insurrection? It seems that when it comes to shortened forms of the language, when adults do it we call them initialisms and they are a sensible part of officialese. But when young people do it on mobile phones, it's called texting and it's the end of the English language as we know it.
This is just one of the myths about e-language that we need to move past. Linguist David Crystal debunked most of them in his 2008 book Txting: The Gr8 Db8. Crystal argued that there is nothing particularly new in text language and it is not the province of the young. More than 80 per cent of texts are actually sent by adults. And fewer than 10 per cent of the words used in instant messaging are terms such as LOL or PAW.
Eroding standards
There's also no definitive evidence that texting or social media have lowered the standard of written English. A few years ago, Britain's Royal Mail surveyed the public about the writing it received from businesses through the post. It discovered that poor expression, spelling and grammar mistakes were costing British businesses up to £41 billion ($68 million) a year in lost trade.
So if we do have a problem with spelling and grammar, it predates the textual revolution. It might be better to look to common underlying causes, such as the way we tossed grammar out of the school system, rather than blaming the new channels of communication.
Shorter attention span or wider participation?
The next accusation against e-language is a more serious one: that the physical constraints of the new media will inevitably diminish our appetite for sustained text and thought. Emails are shorter than formal documents. Phone screens are even more restrictive. And now there's Twitter, the apotheosis of concision at just 140 characters a post.
The neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield attracted worldwide coverage last year when she claimed that new media might be shortening our attention spans and affecting our brains. "If a person uses their phone at the expense of all other forms of expression, there will be a resulting imbalance in their development," she said.
This followed the assertion in the US by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, that we are in danger of losing the English sentence altogether. "We are moving toward the language used by computer programmers and air traffic controllers," he told The Washington Post.
Such dire warnings are usually based on anecdotal evidence. They might have something to them if the qualification Greenfield acknowledges were true: that social media are used at the expense of all other forms. In other words, if the electronic uprising excludes other writing completely, we probably would be left thinking in short snatches. But this is akin to saying that if the only sport we played was rugby league, then no one would be good at tennis. That's a big and unlikely ''if''.
New media, new panic
These arguments remind me of the moral panic that has beset every new form of communication.People claimed the printing press was the devil's tool because it could disseminate lies. The telephone was going to cause family breakdown because we would stop talking to each other in person.
There is no credible evidence to support this assumption that social media will atrophy our brains. Schools still require essays. Workplaces still produce reports. Universities still award degrees for theses. Writers still publish books.
Writing in the new media is not a replacement but an addition to traditional genres. Much of it is a hybrid form somewhere between speech and formal writing. It means our children are, in fact, doing a lot more writing and mastering a much wider range of styles.
The new media are, in fact, proving something of a boon to educators. Universities are finding sites such as Twitter can lift the quality of out-of-classroom interaction and improve the learning environment.
Studies have documented the positive impact of email on learning. One found email helped remedial writing students become more active and motivated learners than those who received classroom instruction alone.
And the social benefits extend well beyond education. The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine reported how patient satisfaction increased significantly when they were able to communicate with their doctor through email as well as face-to-face. Their doctors agreed that email improved both communication and quality of care.
Of course, to realise these benefits, we must be prepared to break down some longstanding barriers between doctors and patients, teachers and students, speakers and audiences, writers and readers.
The real revolution
This is where the real revolution is occurring: not in the surface features of the language that the purists like to parody but in the way that audiences of all kinds will take a more active part in our public conversations.
The journalist Sarah Lacy found this out the hard way when she interviewed Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg during the keynote address at a Texas conference.
The well-informed audience did not warm to her interview style or her questions. Initially they sat in polite silence, then they started to tweet their discontent. A backchannel conversation began as the interview unfolded, with some 500 users posting more than 1800 messages. It wasn't long before the backchannel erupted in the real auditorium. Lacy lost control and had to cede the interviewing to the audience.
This is the future. Increasingly, the public will expect to take an active part in a more meaningful dialogue, whether as students or patients, customers or clients. Already, academic and industry conferences are running a Twitter backchannel through their events so participants can share comments and resources more widely. It is the kind of application that has made adults – not teens – the most prolific adopters of Twitter.
The next step
The debate now is whether we should start publishing these backchannel conversations on a "frontchannel" screen in real time while speakers are presenting. This goes a step further than the existing online backchannel of posting responses to a blog or article.
The ABC's Q&A program, which publishes viewer comments on screen during the discussion, is an indication of what is to come.
Understandably, not everyone is comfortable with this kind of scrutiny. And it raises some thorny questions about editing the backchannel to weed out the libellous, the frivolous and the plain banal.
However, if a defining feature of democracy is the ability of citizens to participate in open debate, then the new media will inevitably strengthen and diversify our public conversations rather than dumb them down.
Full steam ahead
The scale of participation is now beyond anything we've previously experienced. Most of the world's 1.8 billion internet users have email. We text from five billion mobile phones. Facebook already has 400 million users. Nearly all of Australia's 17 million mobiles send text and 70 per cent of our net users are on social networking sites. That's 10 million Australians spending seven hours a month updating their status, poking their friends and tweeting their thoughts.
As for the language that might emerge from this growing electronic exchange, can it really get any worse than what we already experience in the paper world? For example, when General Motors announced it was filing for bankruptcy last year, it described the move as ''an expedited, court-supervised process to accelerate the reinvention of our company''.
Corporate and political spin doctors may be less likely to resort to this kind of doublespeak if they face an overwhelming barrage of backchannel. Our language and our democracy can only be the better for it. |
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