30 Dec 08 The rules of impropriety in chats

This article addresses the topic of the poor and incorrect language that is used in chat rooms. Drawing on ethnographic data, tries to show that this theory is incorrect, in fact, a very important feature of the registration communicative available to users. This topic of research must be put in the context of academic study on computer mediated communication (CMO), and-as it comes to defending the text not be read as an article on language and the Internet but as a article on the digital society.

At this point, the Internet is nothing new. We no longer have to find or start any article on the ‘social’ on the Internet explaining what it is or how it first emerged. Finally, you finished the stage in the glare and exaggerated allegations of apologetic and apocalyptic are melting at an address less exclamation and more realistic.

Throughout the past few years, we have incorporated the new medium between our daily habits, both in terms of work and in the personal. Its importance and its scope are reflected by something as evident as its ubiquity. Internet as a tool has become a daily thing that we have integrated, with no apparent trauma, in our daily practices. We were informed via the Internet; electronic mail has become one of the channels of interpersonal communication more immediate cash in the history of mankind and use people and organizations that have made this space for their own dissemination has meant a change radical of its promotion channels, purchase and sale.

All this is of great importance; however it can be analyzed from an instrumental. The Internet-Instrument, or set of instruments, is a strong pillar of Western society today, everything that it has again and there are many socio-cultural implications that we can find in their path. However, as always, and uses tools, machines and people, can not be analyzed separately nor properly understood without a watch from a standpoint that identifying them as sides of the same coin.

An analysis of social Internet can not afford to ignore its size and technological instrumental in the same way as any technical investigation can not be carried out regardless of the social practices that protect the results of that investigation. In the same way as the railways and the steam engine are much more than icons of industrial society and are crucial to understanding society and culture of the nineteenth century, micro-processors and software technologies that enable communication between machines are at the very foundation of this society that is not only post-industrial and many people called, so quite accurate, digital society.

As social scientists, in these years of discovery and habituation, the line seems drawn out a route from which they were initially on studies of what ‘social’ identíficábamos in or around-the-new information technologies and communication towards what should be increasingly clear, research on the digital society.

In this connection, one of the most famous statements of Marshall McLuhan, we illustrated the big difference between a first phase of use of the new-technology-it is used for tasks and functions prior to her and a second phase, the really interesting in that-new-technology and its users generate new uses, new features and new social spaces. It is in this second phase where we must search for the real ‘revolutions’ technology and it is in this second stage where we can put this so-called digital society. No longer be satisfied with studying the social impact of a set of new tools, because what we have on hand is much more than a series of social consequences and corollaries of something technological. The under construction digital society would be equivalent to that second phase of use of the technology described by McLuhan and this is a digital society that we must turn our gaze as social scientists.

The issue of language and Internet belongs in a sense, this first phase of use of technology just mentioned. This is true if we understand the phenomenon as follows:

Since the eighties, the various tools that we can unite under the name ‘Internet’ have enabled new channels of communication. These new channels of communication quickly became popular thanks to its great effectiveness in improving the existing communication channels, especially since the first ninety in the English-speaking and Scandinavian and later in the rest of the Western world and privileged. The popularization of the new instruments, however, be understood from its effectiveness in relation to some previous Internet communication needs. In this sense, for example, e-mail is often seen in specialized jargon, a ‘killer app’ because it made available to users with a new form of communication revolutionarily faster, and dynamic individual.

The studies on language and Internet and / or language on the Internet often focus on analyzing how we change our registration language on the Internet, understanding the Internet purely as a technology and registration as a pre-existing language and to some extent, stable. The resulting equation, therefore, part of the combination of two factors that are taken in a way decontentexed, as if there were an isolated manner and default: on the one hand, the tongue (its regulatory code and its variants for the oral and written records , Etc.).’s Another technology (machines, cables, software, etc.).. Thus one can make interpretations based on the existence of two separate entities, objective and static and they can get to describe a variety of effects and consequences. In a way, this type of approach has a lot of naturalist-positivist: an ‘A’ exists (for example, the sea), an entity ‘B’ suddenly appears (for example, several thousand tons of oil) and produces an interaction whose effects are perfectly observable and comparable with the situation prior to the interaction. Will produce some changes and establishing comparisons with the previous situation.

Within the framework of the topic of academic research that the language is not static, nor is stable rather than overcome. Similarly, we also read and heard on many occasions that technology alone is nothing, that everything depends on the uses to which it is made. However, these two statements we should lay the basis for any investigation of language and / on the Internet have not been enough on the eve of this area of study. Perhaps the reason why this fact is that this is a new problem, which makes much of the first studies on this subject and the vast majority of the outreach approaches have been built to it from a perspective of the type described as a positivist in the preceding paragraph. One type of analysis is positivist more quickly and effectively to establish relationships, consequences and regularities. And, of course, when launching ‘hold’ and big statements on the matter, something always effective in the context in which we live. However, social scientists have discovered long ago that the social analysis can not rely on simplifications of the social positivist, as’ social ‘always turns out to be much more complex.

In this case, the first studies and approaches to the problem that we have described here as’ positivists’-have been proposed, in most cases, comparisons between the written record (or, more rarely The oral) and the recording media used by users on sites such as Internet chats. These comparisons, as we said before, was down from a starting point and somewhat dubious (the ‘stability’ of the tongue) and with the desire to describe the extent to which the record in communicative chats away from what is usual and standards in previous records.

It is useful, of course, the job description and characterization of what is perceived as a ‘new’ or ‘different’ in a novel communicative as is the chat. This is a material that, if developed properly, you must be a source of ethnographic information needed. In any case, our objections are at the moment what this work of observation, description and classification takes an ethical nuance and the opportunity to develop value-affirmations about the goodness or evil-what found in these descriptions. Often we read this kind of working in which the language of chat rooms is analyzed and assessed in comparison with other registries and on the basis of criteria somewhat dubious as the correction-correction or the lack of normative, quality or wealth lexical, and so on.

A first phase of research on what cyber in this approach have had their starting point: to analyze the language on the Internet itself, describe how far away from the ‘other’ linguistic registers, in particular, the written record and develop – conclusions on this’ removal ‘, almost always kind of pejorative. On many occasions we have come to the cries of alarm about the degeneration of the language in chats on ‘damage’ that makes the respect of the regulatory codes, and so on. These positions are and have been very abundant over the past few years and beyond show a state of anxiety regarding the new effects and social trends that are developing as a result of the popularity of chat, should not be taken into account In any case, working as academic.

Such assertions are quickly discredited by the field study. It seems doubtful that can establish a strong correlation between knowledge and use of the rules of the code written and the routine use of chats leading to the assertion that the latter has a negative impact on the former. In fact, our own field work indicates the opposite: the routine use of chats, if any effect on the knowledge and application of the code policy in general is increasing.

And this is not without a certain dose of logic: a chat, a user spends many hours a week writing, actively, with an intensity and focus much greater than in any other area where he used some form of written language register. Regardless of the degree of use of grammar and spelling rules, the regular use of a chat implies a continued and active contact with a variant of code written with a multitude of other users of it, to a level of intensity, interactivity and much dedication more than in any other situation of written communication in the history of mankind.

Tags: Academic Study, Allegations, Chat Rooms, Cmo, Computer Mediated Communication, Dissemination, Electronic Mail, Glare, History Of Mankind, Impropriety, Incorrect Language, Internet Mail, Interpersonal Communication, Language And The Internet, Pillar, Scope, Standpoint, Tools Machines, Trauma, Ubiquity