Amy,
Could you let me know where your data collection proposal is?
Regards,
Mrs B

Amy,
Could you please indicate where your outstanding homework is (task 11and the exploration of the adverts).
Thank you,
Mrs Beckett

How does technology effect language

How does technology affect the language?

This text is a transcript of a radio phone in, it is for this reason that majority of the text is spontaneously spoken.  However, there are sections of text spoken by the presenter which are clearly planned. This is due to the fact that what is being spoken is broadcast live to the public and therefore minimal mistakes must be made and there must be a constant flow of conversation.

Throughout the text there is evidence of spontaneous speaking, this is evident from the excessive use of brief pauses the speaker makes whilst answering questions. The speaker clearly wants to express all of his views on education and so he is rushing his words an expel of this is when he says ‘mod (.) modern’ the stutter repairs used here portray the speakers anxiousness to speak correctly and show how he is rushing his words out in order to say as much as he can under the time limit.

The discourse structure of the text shows the presenter has the most power, this is shown through the presenters use of language for example he begins with a clear opening ‘Dennis morning to you’ which is then followed by Dennis’s reply ‘good morning’. This use of adjacency pairs continues throughout the text and shows how the presenter is clearly in charge of what the conversation is about. Another example of this is when the presenter interrupts Dennis this is shown he has authority over Dennis and is under a time limit. The teacher has maximum of quantity as he appears to speak too much we know this because he rambles on causing the presenter to interrupt him, the presenter has to do this because the audience may easily loose interest .

Article

Benefits Street's 1,700 complaints: Calls, letters and emails accuse show of glamorising crime, promoting drug use and celebrating welfare dependency

Channel 4’s controversial Benefits Street documentary has now received more than 1,700 complaints as one of its stars was charged with drug and firearms offences.

The broadcaster and TV watchdog Ofcom have been deluged with calls, letters and emails from viewers who accused the five-part documentary of glamourising crime, promoting drug use and celebrating welfare dependency.

 

Language and Technolodgy overview

The examiners advise teachers to use varied types of text in presenting the subject. These might, for example, include:

• transcripts and written records of actuality;
• accounts of popular attitudes in print media;
• examples of represented text (such as invented e-mail messages in fiction and advertising), and
• excerpts from any investigations, including those done by students.

What is technology?

"The medium is the message". Marshall McLuhan

What does it have to do with language?

All technology influences language, in ways that are not always obvious. The development of transport systems, for example, leads people to move around so that language forms used in regional varieties may move into other regions. We use a metaphor such as "all guns blazing" to suggest the idea of an action performed with energy or aggression - so the technology of weapons extends the usage of everyday speech or writing.

Since technology is a means to extend man's reach, then it is necessarily connected to language, in the sense that both natural languages and technologies will be important in enabling us to do all sorts of things in almost any area of human activity. For example, we use aeroplanes to fly people and goods around the world. And we try to make this safer and more efficient by developing an air-traffic control system. That's language and technology working together for the common good.

This uses one kind of technology (radio communication) to support use of language in conversations in an adapted form of international English, that pass on information derived from other technologies (radar, weather-forecasting systems), to the users of yet another set of technologies (the pilots of aircraft).

This may help us to distinguish between the technology in itself, and the things we do with it, from a linguistic perspective. In terms of modelling our ideas about technology and language, we may think

• first of the different technologies (printing, telephony, radio and TV, e-mail and so on)
• and only then about what we do with them.

Alternatively, we may think first of the kind of language interactions we make, and then of the technologies that enable this. We might usefully think of

• levels of openness and privacy - is the language used in a public or restricted context?
• ownership of the communications - does an interaction or any of its results belong to anyone and if so, in what way?
• topology - are these one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many interactions, or something else?

We may then find that particular technologies are designed for, and well suited to, some of these kinds of language use.

We will certainly find that the designers of the technology do not always anticipate the new kinds of language activity that will come from the ways that people use and adapt it. Think, for instance, of gramophone recording (a late 19th century technology) and text-messaging from and to mobile telephones (a late 20th century invention).

The first gramophone or phonograph recordings were made to capture the spoken voice. Yet in time, this technology would emerge as especially well suited to recording musical performances for later playback.

Text messaging is an adaptation of the idea of mobile phone designers to use a simple text display to give the user information about the functions of the handset. Since this information was being displayed on a phone, it soon became apparent that one could use it for entering free text, that the user could transmit, by using the same underlying technology as the voice calls - and that these packets of information would be far smaller, and less costly to transmit.


Does technology make a difference to language use?


In studying language and technology, you will look at how the technology influences the language use, but you should not assume that the use of technology to mediate the language necessarily changes everything.

All kinds of circumstances can affect the way we use language. Using technology may do this - as we may note from the way that some speakers react to a journalist's microphone, or an invitation to leave a message on a telephone answering machine. But we should not suppose that, in the absence of such obvious technology, people speak in a neutral and "natural" way. Whereas in the past, some kinds of formal or rhetorical speaking were regarded as meritorious, and social conversation less well regarded, so now we can make the opposite mistake, and assume that spontaneous speaking of an unstructured kind, using many non-standard terms and constructions, is somehow more natural or authentic (and worthy of study) than more controlled or self-conscious utterance, using standard forms.

Technology can allow us to eavesdrop on conversations legitimately, as when we listen to a radio or TV broadcast. It also allows us to read texts from a greater range of writers - where traditional publishing is more selective and exclusive.

As with traditional publishing, where we do not know how many people have revised or edited the text that we eventually read, so also we cannot always know the process that has produced a text that we read or hear through a technological medium.

Storing and transmitting information

It is easy to show objectively how technology has made it easier to store and transmit information - simply observing the number of documents generally, or of a specific type (say Web logs) on the World Wide Web demonstrates this. Likewise, it is an objective fact that a technology such as e-mail allows the instantaneous transmission of a large text document, with other kinds of data file attached to it, between any computers in the world that are connected to the Internet. And it is also an objective fact that the number of computers connected to the Internet (either occasionally or permanently) is also increasing.


"The Whirlpool Internet fridge is designed to become a key hub for the operation of other networked appliances within on-line homes of the not too distant future. Capabilities of the fridge include:

• Connectivity with other appliances (for example ovens and microwaves)
• Recipe downloads (complete with automatic programming of ovens to pre-heat etc.)
• Refrigerator energy management
• Refrigerator self-diagnosis for repair purposes
• Refrigerator contents inventory (bar coding) for automatic ordering of items
• Internet access
• Virtual fridge magnets

Automatic recording of computer activity

Electronic text, says Mr. Shortis, keeps a record of its history automatically. The user can choose to discard or delete it (though even then, many computer systems will keep a copy of the data from which that record can be restored, before a more permanent act of deletion).

How does this work?

In the case of electronic mail we can choose to keep copies of everything that we send and receive. For things that we receive we often have the further choice of keeping a copy on a local computer and leaving the message on the mail server (a computer connected to the Internet from which a client mail program brings the messages, as they arrive, to the user's computer or other device, such as a PDA).

How ICT texts retain or preserve features of older texts

Tim Shortis suggests that language use through information technology echoes previous genres and technologies. This is not really surprising, but to be expected. Human beings, faced with a new technology, may use it

• in ways that resemble the uses to which they have put earlier technologies, or more simply still,
• to achieve the purposes they have achieved with other kinds of spoken and written text hitherto.

How technology influences new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols

Some people (as any teacher knows) use non-standard ("incorrect" or "bad") spellings. There is nothing new in this - there is plenty of evidence to show that ever since Dr. Johnson and Noah Webster helped us to determine some standards, many real writers have neither known nor conformed to the standard spellings.

What is perhaps different today is that texts containing non-standard spellings may be seen by far wider audiences. It may also be true that these audiences do not notice, or do notice but are not much bothered by, the non-standard forms - because they are more interested in the information or attitudes expressed in the text.

The history of technologies for writing

In the modern world we take for granted the availability of writing materials and implements. But just as writing has a history, so has the material used to transmit it. Some of the most ancient writing in the world that has survived today appears on large blocks of stone. This may be a suitable material for important documents that are meant to be permanent. But fairly early in the history of writing people looked for a way to make texts more portable.

Beginning to study language and technology

In some areas of language study, you may start with an open mind or blank sheet, because you think you do not know the subject. This may be the case with the early history of English or pragmatics, say. When you learn a little more, you may find, after all, that you did have some useful knowledge to start with. In the case of ICT texts, you may face the opposite danger. Because, in one way, you are very familiar with such texts both as author and audience, then you may expect to translate that familiarity easily into firm knowledge about how such texts work.

Computer users as a group - cyber culture

Traditional groups, which are significant for language change, use or interaction, were necessarily located in a common place (region or locale) or class or peer groups. Computer users can meet without being physically close, or even aware of the location of other users. But they are identifiable as a group in their language use, in terms of lexical choice, language fashions and conventions and awareness of language.

Phonology

Do we use different speech sounds when we use certain technologies? Can we account for what we find in answering this question? (For example, does the general tendency towards accommodation become stronger when we use a telephone?)

• Does technology influence such things as suprasegmental features of speech?
• Are we more or less comfortable with pauses and silence than in face-to-face conversation?
• Do we try to fill silences or even ask the other person questions about them? ("Are you still there/all right?")

Lexis

In a written text, the author's sense of style may lead to a kind of evenness, through control of the register - it may be chatty and colloquial, or it may be impersonal and learned in manner, for example. In spontaneous speech it is not always so easy for a speaker to sustain an even style in this way - you may find therefore a mixture of the common register (what the AQA support booklet calls "simple and undemanding vocabulary, typical of speech") with more learned or special lexis. The two transcripts in this guide have just such a mixture - everything from "yeah" and "cool" to "neuropsychologist". We see this unevenness in the second of the shorter extracts below where the presenter begins with a formal: "Good evening, Matthew" and then goes on to say "Cool, go for it". The caller reverses this, starting with less formal "Hello" and "Yeah. I do", but quickly moving to a technical explanation of his ideas for the English team's "changing formation to accommodate [Joe] Cole".

Grammar

This writer is confident in her control of sentence grammar, and uses a range of structures, beginning with a sentence that has a simple main clause, but appends a relative clause ("giving access to poems") at the end.

Discourse features

In an e-mail message, some of the discourse features are automated - in the header information, and sometimes (though not here) in information at the end of the message (typical of business and governmental messages, that contain a disclaimer, suggesting that the provider of the mail service is not liable for the opinions expressed by the sender).

In this case we know

• the sender's name (the form of her name that she has chosen to display in messages sent from this system - she uses her given name and family name, but this could be anything the user chooses),
• her e-mail address (available for replying, copying to other people, adding to an address book and so on) and
• the time when the message was sent from the mail-server (which here is close to the time when she sent the message from her computer).