Language and technology.

What is technology?

"The medium is the message". Marshall McLuhan

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.
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.
The history of language and technology is not as old as the history of language, but is exactly as old as the history of recorded language, which means at first the recording of language by the use of symbols - pictograms and ideograms.


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. In this kind of model, 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?

Example:
From: "Jxxx Xxxxx"

Date: 27/02/2005 10:14AM

Subject: Poetry

Hi XXXXX

One of your correspondents was asking for sites giving access to poems. I'm afraid I deleted his email before I remembered this place (all my old "favourites" got wiped when I upgraded my operating system and I'm only retrieving them at the rate I need them again). It's pretty good - wide-ranging, lots of poems and poets, and pretty good search functions (though I'd like to have the ability to search thematically, stylistically, by poetic form and period, and with an interactive time line, and biographies, and poem notes, and literary reviews... and cultural context material... and... and... and...). Anyway, for future reference, it's http://www.poemhunter.com/

Jxxx


Pragmatics:

• Quality: the utterance is truthful and based on evidence (the sender refers to the evidence by giving the address of the Web site she recommends).
• Quantity: the message is brief (perhaps reflecting some haste in composition - it was sent from the writer's workplace in the mid morning), but long enough to provide detailed information about the resource it recommends.
• Relevance: the sender explains the relevance, in terms of a past request to the recipient.
• Manner: the message is clear, orderly and brief, avoiding ambiguity.

Lexis
This is very much that of the writer's speaking voice - a mixture of everyday conversational vocabulary (hi, pretty good [twice], anyway) and special lexis both to explain something that happened to the sender's computer (favourites, upgraded, operating system) and to comment on the site (thematically, stylistically, cultural context).

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.