The Language Revolution (9 page)

Lag problems make chatroom interactions very different from anything humans have experienced in dialogue before. The frustration is on both sides of the communication chain. From the sender's point of view, the right moment to speak may be missed, as the point to which the intended contribution related may have scrolled off the screen and be fast receding from the group's communal memory. And from the recipient's point of view, the lack of an expected reaction is ambiguous, as there is no way of knowing whether the delay is due to transmission reasons or to some ‘attitude' on the sender's part. Unexpected silence in a telephone conversation carries a similar ambiguity, but at least there we have well-established turn-taking manoeuvres which can bring immediate clarification (‘Hello?', ‘Are you still there?'). The linguistic strategies which express our face-to-face conversational exchanges are much less reliable in chatgroups. Colin may never get a reaction to his reply to Jane because Jane may never have received it (for technical reasons), may not have noticed it (because there are so many other remarks coming in at the same time), may have been distracted by some other conversation (real or on-line), may not have been present at her terminal to see the message (for all kinds of reasons), or simply decided not to respond. Equally, she may have replied, and it is
her
message which has got delayed or lost. When responses are disrupted by delays, there is little anyone can do to sort such things out.

The larger the number of participants involved in an interaction, the worse the situation becomes. Delays in a
conversation between two people are annoying and ambiguous, but the level of disruption is usually manageable, because each person has only one interlocutor to worry about. If a simple e-mail situation is affected by serious delay, feedback via phone or fax is easily providable. But when an electronic interaction involves several people, such as in chatgroups, virtual worlds and e-mails which are copied repeatedly, lag produces a very different situation, because it interferes with another core feature of traditional face-to-face interaction: the conversational
turn.
Turn-taking is so fundamental to conversation that most people are not conscious of its significance as a means of enabling interactions to be successful. But it is a conversational fact of life that people follow the routine of taking turns when they talk, and avoid talking at once or interrupting each other randomly or excessively. Moreover, they expect certain ‘adjacency-pairs' to take place: questions to be followed by answers, and not the other way round; similarly, a piece of information to be followed by an acknowledgement, or a complaint to be followed by an excuse or apology. These elementary strategies, learned at a very early age, provide a normal conversation with its skeleton.

When there are long lags, the conversational situation becomes so unusual that its ability to cope with a topic can be destroyed. This is because the turn-taking, as seen on a screen, is dictated by the software, and not by the participants: in a chatgroup, for instance, even if we did start to send a reaction to someone else's utterance before it was finished, the reaction would take its turn in a non-overlapping series of utterances on the screen, dependent only on the point at which the send signal was received at the host server. 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 electronically through different global routes between sender and receiver, it is even possible for turn-taking reversals to take place, and all kinds of unpredictable overlaps. The time-frames of the participants do not coincide. Lucy asks a question; Sue receives it and sends an answer; but on Ben's screen the answer is received before the question. Or, Lucy sends a question, Sue replies, and Lucy sends another question; but on Ben's screen the second question arrives before Sue's reply to the first. The situation may be further complicated if Sue (or anyone) decides to answer two questions from different participants, sending them together. Steve, meanwhile, copied in to the exchanges, is out of the office, and responds a day later, after other messages have come in. There are enormous possibilities for confusion once orderly turn-taking is so disruptable and adjacency-pairs are so interruptible. What is surprising is that practised participants seem to tolerate (indeed revel in) the anarchy which ensues.

Issues of feedback and turn-taking are ways in which computer-mediated interaction differs from conversational speech. But it is unlike speech also with respect to the formal properties of the medium – properties that are so basic that it becomes extremely difficult for people to live up to the recommendation that they should ‘write as they talk'. Chief among these properties is the domain of
tone of voice –
‘it ain't what you say but the way that you say it' – as expressed through vocal variations in pitch (intonation), loudness (stress), speed, rhythm, pause and other vocal effects. There have been somewhat desperate efforts to replace tone of voice on screen in the form of an exaggerated use of spelling and punctuation, and the use of capitals, spacing and special symbols for emphasis. Examples include repeated letters
(aaaaahhhhh, soooo),
repeated punctuation marks
(whohe????, hey!!!),
and conventions
for expressing emphasis, such as
the *real* point.
These features are capable of a certain expressiveness, but the range of meanings they signal are few, and restricted to gross notions such as extra emphasis, surprise and puzzlement. Less exaggerated nuances are not capable of being handled in this way.

Related to this is the way Netspeak lacks the facial expressions, gestures and conventions of body posture which are so critical in expressing personal opinions and attitudes and in moderating social relationships. The limitation was noted early in the development of Netspeak, and led to the introduction of
smileys
or
emoticons –
combinations of keyboard characters designed to show an emotional facial expression. The two basic types express positive attitudes and negative attitudes respectively (the omission of the ‘nose' element seems to be solely a function of typing speed or personal taste):

: -) or :)    : -( or : (

Hundreds of ludic shapes and sequences have been invented and collected in smiley dictionaries, some extremely ingenious and artistic, but hardly any are used in serious communication. It is plain that they are a potentially helpful but very crude way of capturing some of the basic features of facial expression. They can forestall a gross misperception of a speaker's intent, but an individual smiley still allows a huge number of readings (happiness, joke, sympathy, good mood, delight, amusement, etc.) which can be disambiguated only by referring to the verbal context. Without care, moreover, they can lead to their own misunderstanding: adding a smile to an utterance which is plainly angry can increase rather than decrease the force of the ‘flame'. It is a common experience that a smile can go down the wrong way.

The fact that smileys turn up at all in e-mails and chatroom interaction is indicative of the un-speech-like nature of the medium which the participants are using. Smileys evolved as a way of avoiding the ambiguities and misperceptions which come when written language is made to carry the burden of speech. They are brave efforts, but on the whole Netspeak lacks any true ability to signal facial meaning, and this, along with the unavailability of tones of voice, places it at a considerable remove from spoken language. One day, developments in interactive technology will allow us to see and hear other participants while they are talking, so that some of these limitations will be eliminated; but there will always be properties of the electronic medium which will enable us to use language in ways that traditional speech could never perform.

Not like writing

If Netspeak does not display the properties we would expect of speech, does it instead display the properties we expect of writing? Here too, there are fundamental differences. Let us consider first the space-bound character of traditional writing – the fact that a piece of text is static and permanent on the page. If something is written down, repeated reference to it will be an encounter with an unchanged text. We would be amazed if, upon returning to a particular page, it had altered its graphic character in some way. Putting it like this, we can see immediately that computer-mediated communication is not by any means like conventional writing. A ‘page' on the Web often varies from encounter to encounter (and all have the option of varying, even if page-owners choose not to take it) for several possible reasons: its factual content might have
been updated, its advertising sponsor might have changed, or its graphic designer might have added new features. Nor is the writing that you see necessarily static, given the technical options available which allow text to move around the screen, disappear/reappear, change colour, and so on. And from a user point of view, there are opportunities to ‘interfere' with the text in all kinds of ways that are not possible in traditional writing. A page, once downloaded to the user's screen, may have its text cut, added to, revised, annotated, even totally restructured, in ways that make the result seem to come from the same source as the original. The possibilities are causing not a little anxiety among those concerned about issues of ownership, copyright and forgery.

The other Internet situations also display differences from traditional writing, with respect to their space-bound presence. E-mails are in principle static and permanent, but routine textual deletion is expected procedure (it is a prominent option in the management system), and it is possible to alter messages electronically with an ease and undetectability which is not possible when people try to alter a traditionally written text. What is especially revolutionary about e-mails is the way the medium permits what is called
framing.
We receive a message from M which contains, say, three different points in a single paragraph. We can, if we want, reply to each of these points by taking the paragraph, splitting it up into three parts, and then responding to each part separately, so that the message we send back to M then looks a bit like a play dialogue. Then, M can do the same thing to our responses, and when we get the message back, we see M's replies to what we sent. We can then send the lot on to someone else for further comments, and when it comes back, there are now three voices framed on the screen. And so it can go on – replies within replies within replies – and all unified within the
same screen typography. There has never been anything like this in the history of human written communication. Although in principle it might have been possible to receive a letter, cut it up into strips, intercalate our responses, then paste everything onto another sheet of paper before returning it to its sender, this would hardly count as normal behaviour. But we do this all the time with e-mails, without thinking twice (once we are used to it).

Other features of computer-mediated communication take us even further away from traditional writing. Probably the most important is the
hypertext
link – the jump that users can make if they want to move from one page or site to another. The hypertext link is the most fundamental functional property of the Web, without which the medium would not exist. It does have parallels in some of the conventions of traditional written text. The use of note indicators is a sort of primitive hypertext link, moving the eye from one part of a page to another, or from one page of a text to another (if the notes are collected at the back of a book, as in the present volume, for example). The use within a sentence of bibliographical citations or cross-references (such as ‘see p. 333') is another opportunity for a reader to break away from the conventions of linear viewing. But these features are marginal to traditional written language; we can easily think of texts which have no notes or cross-reference citations at all. The Web, by contrast, could not exist without its hypertext links. As Tim Berners-Lee once put it: ‘Free speech in hypertext implies the “right to link”, which is the very basic building unit for the whole Web.'
⁶
There is nothing in traditional written language which remotely resembles the dynamic flexibility and centrality of Web hypertext linkage.

A few other characteristics of traditional written language also display an uncertain relationship to Netspeak, but these hardly fall into the category of ‘revolutionary'.
E-mails and chatgroup interactions, where the pressure is strong to communicate rapidly, lack the carefully planned, elaborate construction which is characteristic of so much writing. At one extreme, it might well appear that a revolution is taking place. Some people are happy to send messages with no revision at all, not caring if typing errors, erratic capitalization, lack of punctuation and other anomalies are included. This is actually a rather minor effect, which rarely interferes with intelligibility. It is patently a special style arising out of the pressures operating on users of the medium, plus a natural desire (especially among younger – or younger-minded – users) to be idiosyncratic and daring. And that is how it is perceived. If I receive an e-mail from M in which he mis-spells a word, I do not conclude from this that ‘M can't spell'. I simply conclude that M is not a good typist or was in a hurry. I know this because I do the same thing myself when I am in a hurry. There is nothing truly revolutionary here. And it is, in any case, not a universal behaviour. There are many e-mailers who take as many pains to revise their messages as they would in non-Internet settings.

On the whole, Netspeak is better seen as written language which has been pulled some way in the direction of speech than as spoken language which has been written down. However, expressing the question in terms of the traditional dichotomy is itself misleading. Computer-mediated communication is not identical to either speech or writing, but selectively and adaptively displays properties of both. It also does things which neither of the other mediums does, presenting us with novel problems of information management. Consider, as an example, the
persistence
of a conversational message in a chatroom – the fact that it stays on the screen for a period of time (before the arrival of other messages replace it or make it scroll out of sight).
This certainly introduces novel properties to the interaction which are not available in speech. It means, for example, that someone who enters a conversation a couple of turns after an utterance has been made can still see the utterance, reflect upon it, and react to it; the persistence is relatively short-lived, however, compared with that routinely encountered in traditional writing. It also means, for those systems that provide an archiving log of all messages, in the order in which they were received by the server, that it is possible in principle to browse a past conversation, or search for a particular topic, in ways that spontaneous (unrecorded) conversation or traditional book-indexing does not permit.