Language and the Internet- chap 1, 2, 3

• “…that a notion of Netspeak has begun to evolve which is rapidly becoming a part of popular linguistic consciousness, and evoking strong language attitudes” (Crystal, 24). I happen to have one of those strong language attitudes regarding the capital “I” in internet. Having worked for two tech companies as a Marketing Writer, I have struggled with arguing for the lower case option. I use Wired Style as my main reference in support of the lower case "i". http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/08/64596 (published in 2004!). I thought it was strange that Crystal devotes a large part of chapter 3 to discussing “Wired Style [as] an experiment in nonlinear networked editing” (Crystal, 69) and makes a sweeping statement that “…but we do write ‘Internet’ and ‘Net’ (Crystal, 3). Ugh!

• My response as an educator to these chapters was peeked in the discussion of the seven broad internet using situations. While I think the list is somewhat outdated (2006), I appreciate the attempt to chunk usage into definable and recognizable categories: “E-mail, Chatgroups (2 types), Virtual worlds, WWW [this is a huge one, isn’t it], Instant messaging, and Blogging, (Crytsal 11 – 15). Defining these categories is moving closer to fulfilling “the need for greater predictability, reliability, and familiarity is something which affects all Internet situations, and also the language which is found there” (Crystal, 18). I think students exposure to these different types of writing, reading, and authoring should be structured. In my experience at a public high school in Boston, students were mainly exposed to authoring centered around 5 paragraph essays for standardized tests. As an ESL teacher, I was conflicted when lessons on postcard writing were structured, but email, blogging, and social networking are left to students to negotiate on their own.

• “Will all users of the Internet present themselves, through their messages, contributions, and pages, with the same kind of graphic orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and discourse features?” (Crystal, 10). I think there is a problem in the logic of this question because traditional print writing does not offer identical practice of these features (especially across genre). I think two issues to address the sameness of these features should be awareness of author (Crystal, 20) and formality. I think, emails with typos are absolutely judge in formal settings (at work) but not in informal (to friends). Although in formal settings, I personally forgive the capitalization errors if I know an email is written from a Blackberry (or some other thumb writing device). I think this should be included in Crystal's quote about the ‘save a keystroke’ principle influencing the tendency to use lower case everywhere. (Crystal, 90). Back to the main point of this bullet, the formality of this blog is much lower than what I would write if I was submitting a paper. Students should have practice mastering when to use different levels of formality and when audience concerns impacts what they write.

• “They are realizing that their established knowledge, which has enabled them to survive and succeed in spoken and written linguistic encounters hitherto, is no longer enough to guarantee survival and success on the Internet” (Crystal, 66). This is absolutely a factor in terms of adult education. In my first corporate experience I was asked to go to all the US offices to train executives on how to write effective electronic copy mainly because they realized they had to correspond intelligently via email and there was no time for a secretary to edit. This fact is making professional writers more and more valuable as members of the corporate world.

• On a fun note, emoticons (Crystal, 39) were invented at CMU (haha): http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/beyond/2007/summer/happy-25th-emoticon.shtml

• I personally enjoyed footnote 23 on page 94. The text was ““Hay! Odz r he went 2 Radio Hack 4 a nu crys 4 hiz rainbow box!” and footnote 23 was “I don’t understand it either (Crystal, 94).