Technology in Shaping the Use of English - Research Paper Example

Technology in Shaping the Use of English s Submitted by s: Introduction Over time, technology has revolutionised the way people communicate due to the introduction of faster and easier ways of communications. The emergence of the use of mobile phones, texts, email, print press as well as the internet at large has played a role in the modification of the English language in addition to the modes and means of communication. Most people are able to speak and hear language without the need for anything that would normally be called a technology, but the same cannot be said when it comes to writing and reading starting with what is known as a writing system. A writing system is a set of symbols used for producing linguistic expressions in textual form; linguists have sometimes assumed that the writing system of a language does (or should do) no more than represent the way the language sounds, (Allington & Mayor, 2012, p. 267). In alphabetic writing systems, the alphabetic principle dominate meaning that most or all of the symbols used correspond in some way to sounds, enabling words to be spelled out using sequences of symbols roughly corresponding to the sequences of sounds produced when the same words are spoken. In practice, any correspondence may be very rough indeed, as we see when we consider the ‘silent’ letters demanded by the orthographies (i.e. spelling systems) of many modern languages, including English. Print Technology Technologies are needed to put writing systems to use. Symbols can be shaped with a pen, brush or chisel, printed on a variety of surfaces or substituted with numbers. In medieval Europe and the ancient world, the wax tablet was a common erasable medium, and some of the oldest texts in existence – the cuneiform tablets of Sumeria – were written by pressing the tip of a reed into wet clay. Patterns of raised dots form the symbols used in Braille, a writing system read with the fingertips rather than the eyes. And a person producing text by pressing buttons on a keyboard is said to be ‘writing’– unless he or she is copying a text or taking down dictation, in which case ‘typing’ is the usual word, (Allington & Mayor, 2012, p. 270). The first use of printing was not to reproduce text, but to reproduce images, using the technology of the woodcut. The first stage was to cut the required design into a block of wood with a knife and the block would then be smeared with ink, which would be transferred to a sheet of paper from the raised parts of the block. If you ever made potato prints as a child, you will understand the general principle. Like paper, this technology was invented in China, where from the eighth century onwards it was used not only in the reproduction of pictures, but also in the reproduction of whole pages of text: one can cut logograms or letters into a woodblock much as one would incise it with the lines of a detailed drawing. Before long, whole books and newspapers were being manufactured in this way, and by the fifteenth century, a crude form of woodblock printing had reached as far as Europe, where it was used to produce playing cards and religious images. In the mid-fifteenth century, however, European printing technology was radically improved by Johannes Gutenberg. A goldsmith from Mainz (in present-day Germany), Gutenberg seems to have realised that he didn’t have to cut each page of text into a fresh block of wood and then press paper or vellum on to it by hand. Instead, he could produce metal blocks bearing letters and punctuation marks, which could be fitted together and printed in a device probably inspired by a medieval wine press; these pieces of type could be combined with woodcuts to produce an illustrated text. It is not known much about the actual process and materials Gutenberg used, but it is probably fair to regard him as the inventor of the hand press and the pioneer of printing European languages with moveable type. Printing also had an impact on the way that language was used, bringing more and more people into direct contact with the written word. The literary critics argued that the technology of printing transformed Western society, producing a new kind of person that he called ‘typographic man’ and asserted that the interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world’. This position has been described as technological determinism: the view that social and personal change is driven by the introduction of new technologies. On a historical level, it can be misleading, in part because technology usually develops in response to existing needs. Gutenberg’s invention caught on so quickly in western and central Europe because the demand for books there was already too great to be satisfied through scribal production; where existing demand was lower (as in Russia), it was much longer before the new technology was taken up. As printing came to supersede hand-copying by scribes as the primary means of textual reproduction, texts came to be more widely disseminated and more standardised (as with The Canterbury Tales) – and readers came to be more critical of what they read. This was less because of the technology itself than because of its deployment in an industry primarily owned by entrepreneurs: instead of trying to impose texts on people through the exercise of authority, printers and booksellers competed with one another to produce the best editions and to sell them as widely as possible. Economic history shows that this picture is idealised, since laws of copyright limit direct competition between publishers of new texts, resulting in a tendency to produce relatively expensive editions for relatively exclusive audiences. But despite this, the audience for print certainly became far larger, and far less exclusive, than the medieval audience for hand copied manuscripts had been. According to Allington & Mayor (2012, p. 286), the use of a standard print-language enables printers to cater not only to readers who speak the language varieties on which that print-language is based, but also to readers who speak language varieties that are, in other terms, ‘assimilable’ to the standard; that is, similar enough for the print language not to seem completely foreign. Such readers might not be in a position to demand their own print-language. But without one, they find themselves in a position of inferiority, since print comes to define the standard for speech as well as for writing. At the same time utterances of non-standard form have less value on the ‘linguistic market’, resulting in material disadvantage for speakers who struggle to produce the standard form of a language in situations where it is required. Digital Technology and Online Platforms According to Allington & Mayor (2012, p. 308), the term digital describes the technique of storing, transmitting and processing data which sits behind these advances: it involves transforming information of every kind, from text to sound to image, into sequences of numbers. Most electronic gadgets are now driven by digital technology: watches, cameras and washing machines, as well as computers and mobile phones. Developments in these technologies appear to be having a profound and potentially lasting impact on English, affecting both the forms of the language itself and the communicative practices in which its speakers engage. The term digital English encompasses both the changing language and the emerging practices; online communities – for example, the users who contribute to and consult entries in online resources such as Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary – are developing new literacy practices around digital texts; that is, texts that are stored in a digital medium rather than printed, written or engraved on a physical surface. Rather than being constrained by technology (as is assumed in technological determinism), individuals can potentially exploit different technologies in different ways. One way of understanding this is to see the features or potential constraints of a medium as its affordances. This term describes the possible ways in which a technology can be used, for example, SMS (Short Message Service) may have appeared to be a constraining and unlikely medium of communication when it was added to mobile phones in the 1990s as a way for engineers to communicate. However, the people who took up the technology and used it for various social purposes (the start of text messaging as we know it!) saw and exploited possibilities that the phone manufacturers had underestimated as they had perceived its affordances. A distinct graphology in the use of texts can be seen in the spelling variants or respellings; for example, due2da (due to the) and 3months preg (three months pregnant). The term ‘respellings’ avoids judgements about correctness, and instead focuses on the role that unconventional spellings can play in conveying identity and makes the language difficult for an outsider to understand. In this case, this is not so much because of respellings, like da for ‘the’, or 2 and c for ‘to’ and ‘see’, but because of the number of ‘local’ forms which occur in it. These include respellings and other features characteristic of the region of South Africa from which the message is sent: Brur is ‘brother’, sharp is ‘cheers’ or ‘see you’, and 2bed one matras refers to a local joke about a missing mattress which hinges on the mispronunciation of ‘too bad’ as ‘two bed’. These give a strong sense of local identity to the text message. What initial observations can be made about digital English? The first aspect to which I would like to draw your attention is the diversity of digital practices. The texts given in the extracts above suggest that digital English cannot be thought of as one homogenous form of language. Instead, digital technology provides a number of distinct media, which are associated with distinctive varieties of English: IRC, text messaging, wikis, and so on. As well as linguistic forms, the distinctive features that characterise digital Englishes include images that accompany texts, as well as the hyperlinks and embedded sound files, and specific graphological practices, such as particular forms of respelling. Although many of these features are necessarily lost when transferred to the pages of a printed book like this one, these forms of multimodality form an essential part of digital Englishes. One of the possibilities offered by digital technologies is that they open up global spaces for vernacular writing. The practice of sending postcards is one of the many ways in which people have engaged in vernacular writing. Digital technologies encourage us to revisit what vernacular writing means. Communicating via networked technologies adds to the many ways in which people can participate in everyday acts of writing, in some cases enabling new interactions and ways of communicating between people in different locations; and, in others, transforming existing writing practices. The relationship between English and the internet is somewhat different from that of other languages, due to the prominent role that English, or varieties of English, play in the world today. One question is whether the internet is further promoting the use of English globally or whether it is facilitating the use and spread of other languages. A related question is how much linguistic diversity there is online; that is, how many languages are represented on the internet. It would appear by most accounts that the dominance of English is declining. English speakers accounted for over a quarter of all internet users in 2010, down from nearly a third in 2005. However, despite this decline, English still appears to be the most used language on the internet. Conclusion Two points emerge from discussion of these digital practices. First, the impact of a digital medium on language and on society depends on how particular users choose to exploit it. Its impact is not an inevitable result of particular features of the technology, but is forged through people’s purposes, interactions and relationships. This brings up the second point, which is that digital English cannot be seen as representing a clean break from practices that could previously have taken place only through written and printed texts or through speech. It appears that the digital media have not just caused the appearance of entirely new forms of language use, but afforded us new ways of mediating existing communicative practices, (Allington & Mayor, 2012, p. 335). References Allington, D., & Mayor, B. M. (2012). Communicating in English: Talk, text, technology. 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