Cybertalk at Work and at Play

Visible Language, 2005 by Baron, Naomi S

Cybertalk at Work and at Play

Cybertalk at Work and at Play

Book Review Article

Books reviewed:

Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online Brenda Danet Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001 ISBN 1859734243 418 pages, illustrated, some in full color, softbound, $29.95

The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone's Impact on Society Rich Ling San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2004 ISBN 1558609369 244 pages, softbound, $34.95

Netlinguistics: Language, Discourse, and Ideology in Internet Santiago Posteguillo Castello de la Plana: Publications de la Universitat Jaume 1, 2003 180 pages, softbound, 13euro

Two summers ago, I received a request from my university's Media Relations office to respond to a reporter's appeal for comments on a growing Internet practice. The query, from a small-town newspaper in Virginia, went like this: At area funeral homes, I have noticed a new trend of asking people to e-mail condolences. How popular is this becoming? What does it do for the family to have these messages to save? ... No phone calls, please. Need North American and European leads by noon EDT tomorrow.

Email condolences? What kind of sterile cyberbots were some people becoming, I asked myself - until I remembered my own "sympathy email" a few months back sent to a colleague whose father had died. For better or worse, the Internet is becoming an accepted venue for dealing even with death, alongside its ever-expanding mainstream functions.

In the emerging field of Internet research, scholars use the term "computer-mediated communication" (or CMC) to refer to a cluster of interpersonal communication systems that convey written text, mostly over the Internet but also via satellite transmissions more generally. CMC may be synchronous (e.g., instant messaging, Chat) or asynchronous (e.g., email, text messaging on mobile phones_1). More broadly defined, CMC is text of any sort that is conveyed through such media, widening the scope to include issues of Web-page layout, script option and translation. Since users of CMC commonly refer to their written messages as forms of "talk" (e.g., the common CMC acronym "ttyl" means "talk to you later"; people speak of having instant messaging "conversations"), we might alternatively refer to such interpersonal exchanges as cybertalk.

Cybertalk is increasingly becoming part of our social fabric. Social scientists (e.g., Silverstone and Haddon, 1996) speak of the "domestication" of information communication technologies (ICTs), meaning the process of adopting these technologies into our homes (e.g., televisions) or larger social practices (e.g., computers or mobile phones). Such adoptions are hardly uniform within or across social groups. For example, email was "domesticated" earlier in the US than in Europe, while the reverse was true of mobile phones.

Half-way through the opening decade of the 21st century, we are awash in information communication technologies that enable us to interact at a distance through a wide range of venues. On personal computers, we send email and instant messages (IMs), engage in Chat and newsgroup discussions, or participate in listservs and online conferencing. On mobile phones, we hold voice-to-voice conversations, leave voicemail for one another, send text messages or perform interpersonal Internet functions (e.g., email and IM).

The study of cybertalk (aka CMC) has been attracting increasing attention among linguists, sociologists, and computer scientists, especially over the past decade. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication first appeared (online, of course) in 1995, soon followed by Susan Herring's defining edited volume (1996) on Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Early "classic" analyses of CMC include Ferrara, Brunner and Whittemore, 1991; Maynor, 1994; Collot and Belmore, 1996; Yates, 1996; and Baron, 1998. Among the more recent discussions are Crystal, 2001; Hard af Segerstad, 2002; Herring, 2002 and Baron, 2003. Linguistic dissections of specific forms of CMC include Boneva and Kraut, 2002 on email, Jacobs, 2003 and Baron, 2004 on instant messaging and Ling, In Press on mobile phone texting.

After more than a decade of studying CMC, researchers generally agree about a number of its properties. First, CMC, on average, is more informal than written language used for comparable purposes. Second, although cybertalk sometimes employs a kitbag of special linguistic tools (including emoticons, abbreviations and acronyms), these forms are not as commonly used as the popular literature (e.g., Lee, 2002) has led us to believe, especially among interlocutors beyond the mid-teenage years. Third, message construction tends to become increasingly informal and even playful as users become more experienced with the medium. And fourth, there is so much variation across users, usage contexts and specific types of ICTs (e.g., email on PCs versus texting on a mobile phone) that whatever generalizations researchers try to draw about the linguistic shape of cybertalk are sure to be met with widespread exceptions.