[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.g.7/3/00 is 7 March in the UK, 3 July in the USA); e-mails which talk about '3 o'clock' without making it clear whether morning or afternoon is intended; e-mails which assume that local abbreviations (e.g.ABC) will be universally familiar (whereas it means one thing in the USA and another in Australia); e-mails which assume that a local geographical reference will be known (e.g.East Coast); and so on.Many e-mail users are still getting to grips with these matters (see further, chapter 8).The evolution of e-mail style is in its infancy, 38 and perhaps the only thing we can say for certain is that it will soon no longer be as it currently is.Generalizations about the medium have hitherto been heavily influenced by its technical origins and early years of use.There is an understandable tendency to think of e-mailing solely in terms of informality.It feels temporary, indeed, and this promotes a sense of the carefree.Messages can be easily deleted, which suggests that their content is basically unimportant.Because of its spontaneity, speed, privacy, and leisure value, e-mail offers Angell and Heslop (1994: 6).he option of greater levels of informality than are found elsewhere in traditional writing.But as the medium matures, it is becoming apparent that it is not exclusively an informal medium, and received opinion is going to have to change.Hale and Scanlon observe: 'A well-written electronic missive gets to the point quickly, with evocative words, short grafs, and plenty of white space.Spelling and punctuation are loose and playful.(No-one reads email with red pen in hand.)' 39 The evidence is growing that an awful lot of people actually do keep such a pen in mind, in educational, business, and other workplace settings, where e-mails are routinely seen as providing a more convenient professionalism (one that can speed up decision-making and build strong daily working relationships) rather than just an opportunity for a chat.Certainly, the spirit of the e-mail style manuals is very much towards being careful, stressing the communicative limitations of the medium (suchas those discussed in chapter 2).In due course, this emphasis seems likely to gaing round.The result will be a medium which will portray a wide range of stylistic expressiveness, from for maltoin formal, just as other mediums have come to do, and where the pressure on users will be to display stylistic consistency, in the same way that this is required in other forms of writing.40 E-mail will then take its place in the school curriculum, not as a medium to be feared for its linguistic irresponsibility (because it allows radical graphological deviance) but as one which offers a further domain within which children can develop their ability to consolidate their stylistic intuitions and make responsible linguistic choices.E-mail has extended the language's stylistic range in interesting and motivating ways.In my view, it is an opportunity, not a threat, for language education.5 The language of chatgroupsThe Internet allows people to engage in a multi-party conversation online, either synchronously, in real time, or asynchronously, in postponed time (chapter 1).The situations in which such interactions take place have been referred to in various ways, partly reflecting the period in Internet history when they were introduced, and partly reflecting the orientation and subject-matter of the group involved, such as chatgroups, newsgroups, usergroups, chatrooms, mailing lists, discussion lists, e-conferences, and bulletin boards.In this book, I have used chatgroups as a generic term for world-wide multi-participant electronic discourse, whether real-time or not.There is a technical overlap with e-mailing: a mailing list is essentially an e-mail address which redirects a message to a set of other addresses.It is also possible for pairs of chatgroup members to arrange to communicate privately by e-mail or using some other messaging facility.However, from a linguistic point of view it is important to distinguish the chatgroup from the e-mail situation (chapter 4), in that the latter is typically between a pair of named individuals (or institutions), with message-exchanges often limited to a single transaction, and relating to a specific, pre-planned question.Chat groups, by contrast, typically involveseveral people, with message-exchanges of ten anonymous, continuing in definitely, and dealing with a wide and unpredictable range of issues.Although there are several points of linguistic similarity between the two situations, the linguistic features and strategies taken up by chatgroup participants are very different from those typically employed by e-mail users
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
