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.But web pages often provide visualaids to support text, in the form of photographs, maps, diagrams,animations, and the like; and many virtual-world settings have avisual component built in, with signs of adaptation even in text-only worlds (such as instructions to  move North or  leavethrough the East door on a game screen; see p.184).The arrivalof webcams is also altering the communicative dynamic ofNetspeak interactions, especially in instant messaging.Is Net-speak factually communicative (item 5 in table 2.4)? For theWeb, blogs, and e-mails, the answer is a strong yes.The othertwo situations are less clear.Within the reality parametersestablished by a virtual world, factual information is certainlyroutinely transmitted, but there is a strong social element alwayspresent which greatly affects the kind of language used.Chatgroups vary enormously: the more academic and profes-sional they are, the more likely they are to be factual in aim(though often not in achievement, if reports of the amount offlaming are to be believed); the more social and ludic chatgroups,on the other hand, routinely contain sequences which havenegligible factual content.Instant message exchanges are alsohighly variable, sometimes containing a great deal of informa-tion, sometimes being wholly devoted to social chit-chat.Finally, is Netspeak graphically rich? Once again, for the Webthe answer is yes, its richness having increased along with tech-nological progress, putting into the hands of the ordinary user a50 language and the internetrange of typographic and colour variation that far exceeds thepen, the typewriter, and the early word processor, and allowingfurther options not available to conventional publishing, such asanimated text, hypertext links, and multimedia support (sound,video, film).On the other hand, as typographers and graphicdesigners have repeatedly pointed out, just because a new visuallanguage is available to everyone does not mean that everyonecan use it well.Despite the provision of a wide range of guides toInternet design and desk-top publishing,27 examples of illeg-ibility, visual confusion, over-ornamentation, and other inade-quacies abound.They are compounded by the limitations of themedium, which cause no problem if respected, but which areoften ignored, as when we encounter screenfuls of unbroken text,paragraphs which scroll downwards interminably, or text whichscrolls awkwardly off the right-hand side of the screen.Thedifficulties are especially noticeable in blogging, where manypages fail to use the medium to best effect.The problems ofgraphic translatability are only beginning to be appreciated  thatit is not possible to take a paper-based text and put it on a screenwithout rethinking the graphic presentation and even, some-times, the content of the message.28 Add to all this the limitationsof the technology.The time it takes to download pages whichcontain  fancy graphics and multimedia elements is a routinecause of frustration, and in interactive situations can exacerbatecommunicative lag (p.34).Disregarding the differences between Internet situations, intables 2.3 and 2.4, and looking solely at the cells in terms of  yes , variable , and  no , it is plain that Netspeak has far more propertieslinking it to writing than to speech.Of the 42 cells in the speechsummary in table 2.3, only 15 are  yes , 4 are  variable , and 23 are no.The situation for the writing summary in table 2.4, as wewould expect, is almost exactly the reverse: 11 are  yes , 8 are variable , and 23 are  no.Once we take the different Internetsituations into account, then the Web is seen to be by far the closest27 28For example, Pring (1999).For graphic translatability, see Twyman (1982).The medium of Netspeak 51to written language, with instant messaging furthest away, and theother situations in between.The differences are striking, as laterchapters will further illustrate.But on the whole, Netspeak is betterseen as written language which has been pulled some way in thedirection of speech than as spoken language which has been writtendown.However, expressing the question in terms of the traditionaldichotomy is itself misleading.Netspeak is identical to neitherspeech nor writing, but selectively and adaptively displays prop-erties of both.Davis and Brewer see it thus, as an eclectic resource: Writing in the electronic medium, people adopt conventions oforal and written discourse to their own, individual communicativeneeds [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]