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).
