Language in New Media

Abstract

Slouching towards the ordinary in SMS txting? How does the analysis of a data set collected over the ten years in which SMS txting diffused into the unremarkable mass literacy practice of 2010 offer insights into what is going on in SMS txt messaging? What methodological issues are presented by such a collection of longitudinally sampled evidence? This paper engages with the conference theme of recognising the mundane aspects of digitally mediated communication when it has the kind of ubiquitous distribution of SMS txting in the UK. I draw on my long-running doctoral study of SMS text messaging with data first gathered at the point when txting first began to be used by UK adolescents and early adopters in 2000 through to the current unremarkable ubiquity of txting, all in the context of ongoing technological and economic change in phone technology and contracts. I respond to the issue raised some years ago by Susan Herring : the tendency for CMC scholarship to follow in the wake of the latest popular technologies, in an attempt to get a descriptive fix on their affordances and emergent cultures of use." Drawing on corpus textual evidence, online surveys of user reports of attitudes and practices, and interviews with early adopters, all sampled and re-sampled over a ten year period, I argue the analysis of longitudinal data collection re-focuses new media scholarship on the practices of the ordinary and on the user. Such an approach foregrounds user trajectories in the linguistic and semiotic choices made with a variety of virally distributed new media literacy practices over the focus on technologically enabled affordances and situational and media-intrinsic properties of single CMC genre types, as handled by Herring's later faceted classification scheme (2007). Herring, S. (2004) Slouching Toward the Ordinary: Current Trends in Computer-Mediated Communication New Media Society 2004; 6; 26 Shortis, T., 2001 The Language of ICT London: Routledge SHORTIS, T. (2007 ) Revoicing Txt: Spelling, Vernacular Orthography and 'Unregimented Writing' IN Posteguillo, S., Esteve, M. J. & Gea, M. L. (Eds.) The Texture of Internet: netlinguistics. Cambridge, Cambridge Scholar Press. Thurlow, C. and Poff, C. in S. C. Herring, D. Stein & T. Virtanen (eds), Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Tagg, C. (2007) 'Corpus-based analysis of SMS text messaging'. IN TEO, P. & HO, C. (Eds.) Discourse in the Modern World: Perspectives and Challenges. Singapore, McGraw-Hill.Slouching towards the ordinary in SMS txting? <<The above assumptions have given rise to a tendency for CMC scholarship to follow in the wake of the latest popular technologies, in an attempt to get a descriptive fix on their affordances and emergent cultures of use. Consider the rapid popularization of blogging, for example, and the scholarly attention that it is presently attracting. (Conversely, how many scholars are researching MOOs anymore?)Yet, although this technology- driven agenda may seem justified, it suffers from a systematic bias: it overestimates the novelty of much CMC, and underestimates the effects of social forces such as mass popularization, according to which mundane uses of technologies tend to co-opt their destabilizing potentials over time. Brown (2000) flagged this process with respect to the commercialization of women's content on the world wide web several years ago. Could it be that the CMC of chatrooms, web boards, text messaging on mobile phones, blogs, and such like is also on its way to becoming mundane and ordinary? If so, how can this trajectory be reconciled with the perception of seemingly endless technological innovation?>> Herring 2004