Language and Communication in Cyberspace

James Pustejovsky

The growing popularity of the web and the increasing familiarity of web-based communication is a major new social phenomenon. Beyond the more visible effects that the web is having on patterns of work, community structures, and personal interactions, a significant shift is also occurring in the way language is being used. This change will have profound and lasting affects on language and communication. A new structured form of linguistic interaction is emerging, one that is native to the web, but one which could impact our current modes of discourse as significantly as the emergence of writing itself. This language structure is "webspeech", the uniquely identifiable mode of communication over the electronic medium of the web.

What distinguishes webspeech as a unique language structure is the mixture of textual strategies with modes of spoken discourse. What is both interesting and surprising is that it is possible to characterize the properties of webspeech and how it differs from written text and discourse. More significantly, just as writing gave rise to the ability to abstract about the word, phrase, and sentence, webspeech allows us the ability to abstract the interaction, the ply, and the exchange in the discourse itself. This is only possible because the structure of the medium provides a model for the interaction, where a model did not and could not exist before. That is, just as writing provides a model for speech (and not a true representation of what is spoken), webspeech provides a model for the discourse.

As with other writing systems, webspeech fails in many ways to convey certain intentions and meanings, which in spoken language are conveyed by context, tone of voice, and other means. Clues for sincerity, seriousness, and commitment are absent in written text, but are to a large extent, being reconstructed in webspeech. What is unique and different about webspeech is the attempt to overcome the inadequacies of the written medium, as they pertain to these hidden and contextual meanings and the background knowledge of the utterance. There are two factors contributing to the solution of these problems. First, current and emerging communication software enables the "speaker" to chronicle the interaction in a complete and simple fashion as never done before; e.g. keeping records of all message to you, in the inbox, and all mail that you've sent out, the outbox. Furthermore, the speaker is able to richly annotate an utterance in response to a message, by fully or partially repeating the content, or even by in-line repeat-with-commentary. This ability, taken together with the speed of the interaction on the web gives us, as writers/communicators, a newly structured tool of abstraction. What emerges from all this is something completely new to the medium; a syntax of the communicative interaction. The abstraction of discourse interactions provided by webspeech will have profound affects on the other modes of language and how we conceptualize language.

Webspeech will also have a profound impact on linguistic diversity. Just as printing and movable type destroyed the orthographic and linguistic variance within related language communities (e.g., dialects of French in the 15th c.), webspeech has the potential to marginalize over half of the world's languages, simply because of the "global market" nature of the web. A 'community' tends to maximize availability of its discussion, forcing it to adopt de facto standards already in place or successfully being traded on the communication market (the web), i.e., English, German, Spanish. For some languages, this marginalization will result in near obliteration, in spite of various political moves to promote a particular linguistic agenda. Furthermore, there are currently orthographic problems with any script not using the 8-bit Roman character set.

Finally, there are important issues as relating to free speech. Because the web is both radio- and TV-like as well as telephone- and letter-like, there are competing and contrary traditions as to what is considered permissible. Regulation of transmitted material has a different history and set of standards from the regulation of speech-like communication. These are in obvious conflict on the web. There are also varying degrees of privacy, ranging from websites and newsgroups to personal email interactions.