It’s generally held that teh intarweb pretty much separates itself from other media in that it’s a two-way street. I publish information in some corner of the web, you publish (as in, comment, vote, react, share, etc.) right back. Sure, “long ago” we had ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the paper, but now communication with those who publish information of any kind is taking place in a way planet Earth has pretty much never seen before.
So, the big questions that I am sure are being researched in the halls of academia today, especially in the field of linquistics, are probably these: How is the internet altering language? How is the internet creating new words and new meanings, or even new languages, such as “AOL speak” (think the letters L-O-L, as in laugh out loud) or “1337 speak” (that’s the word “leet” – for example the 3′s are backwards E’s – as in, “elite internet user speak”, something only other nerds are supposed to understand)? Are typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors merely another way people are accepting written communication as the next evolution of the English language? Is all this hurting or helping the English language? And so on and so forth.
My observations are thus: writing and speaking have always been in two separate camps. I can get away with saying certain things out-loud, or phrasing certain things certain ways, all of which generally make perfect sense to listeners, while not being called out on it or even considered necessarily “grammatically” incorrect. Most people don’t stop to think about it because they are listening for the gist of your words, the kernel of meaning contained in the hyperbole. Speech is received and interpreted in a very different way than what we actually read with our eyeballs. There, voice, intonation, inflection, and interpretation of meaning happen much differently. But, the very words in the dictionary that are traditionally reserved for the pathology of spoken communication have been co-opted by the Internet. Terms like “chatting”, “discussion”, “commenting” and so forth. In print, I imagine, you would never refer to a letter to the editor and the corresponding response from the paper as “talking”, but turn on CNN for five minutes and you are bound to hear Anderson Cooper say something like “Let’s see what people are talking about on-line…”, or something similar to that. Writing is not talking, plain and simple. But, thanks to the Internet, the definition of what talking means has changed.
So, when we see web-based writing, be it an email from a friend, a comment left in a forum, or some silly blog entry like this one, are we reading this communication, which is now somehow artificially the act of talking, or are we listening to these exchanges? How far can we go in redefining the very act of writing, which is what I would argue 90% of web communication is, to be completely considered speaking, not writing, to one another? Yes, it’s a question of semantics, but one that annoys me. I’m not technically chatting with someone on-line if I never utter a word from my mouth, and neither are they.
Which brings me to the YouTube Audio Preview: are we getting to a point that gaffes, mistakes, and errors made in the formulation of written words and written sentences will inevitably have to be considered as acceptable as the natural gaffes, mistakes, and oratorical errors heard with the ear in aural exchange? Say it isn’t so! Meaning can be completely lost when typos, misspellings, and logical missteps are so replete you have no idea what the person is trying to communicate. Worse still, many people have truly crazy things they want to write on-line (excuse me, we call it “say” on-line now, they want to “say” things). Most people are familiar with how bad commenting on-line can be, and no place seems to be more atrociously grammatically and logically inept when it comes to written language than in the commentary found on YouTube, as noted in the XKCD comic embedded above. This web comic further illustrates just how silly most people would feel if they never took the time to actually consider what they were saying on YouTube:
Well, low and behold the folks at YouTube went ahead and implemented an Audio Preview tool for text you enter into the comment field on YouTube videos. The XKCD blog covers it here. Marvellous! What an invention. But, will “hearing” yourself before you post stem the tide of idiocy in YouTube comments? Probably not. It seems bad writing online (and yes, this is ALL pretty much written communication no matter what Anderson Cooper says it is on TV) is here to stay. Even my writing, I am certain, is rife with goofs and gaffes. Check out SomethingAwful.com’s fake creation Jeff K for a perfect example/mockery of what I mean.
Now, before you assume I’m griefing it all, I still feel there is plenty of on-line cultural “speech” creation to love, such as 1337 speak, because it acknowledges ones understanding of web culture and adheres to a more complicated vernacular than just being simple bad grammar or unintelligable numerical and symbolic coding. Leet is great. No, not even popular slang like LOL is a target for me, as slang had always existed well before the Net. Basically, when you do it on purpose, that’s fine by me. It’s when you can’t even bother to spell check, or re-read what you just typed before hitting the return key, or take a few minutes to Google or search through Wikipedia before asserting or recycling a dubious statement (however unreliable such sources may actually be), or even merely take a moment to think about what you are trying to communicate before typing – that’s when I get irritated. The Internet is a collaborative writing project which is succeeding in killing the written word as an artform and communication tool, instead of elevating it. But, maybe Audio Preview will help us see just how incoherent we all sometimes can be in our print forms.
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Tags: communication, writing, youtube