Birds or Antelope:
A Matter of Perspective
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
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The drawing is simple enough (figure 1): a few lines and curves with a dot inside.
Surely it must be some sort of animal. But what kind? The answer depends upon other
knowledge or experience you bring to the interpretation. Add a swooping chest and you
get a bird (figure 2). Add four legs and you get an antelope (figure 3).
All observations, as Norwood Russell Hanson notes, are theory-laden (1958).
This truism is as applicable in analyzing the effects of technology on human language
as it is in rethinking the history of science. The way we look at seemingly "objective"
data - from the movement of planets to the composition process - is inevitably
colored by the cognitive and social models we bring to our studies.
The object of
observation in this paper is written language, and ultimately, the writing we do
when sending electronic mail across a network or the Internet. Our question is,
what are the characteristics of this writing, and how did they get to be that way.
The thesis, following Hanson, is that our observations of email are likely to be
theory-laden. The perspective coloring the common view is that the linguistic
characteristics of email, often described as a cross between speech and writing,
emerge from the networking technology through which email is composed and distributed.
This paper will argue, instead, that the speech-like aspects of email are as much
the product of ideological shifts regarding written American English over the past
century as they are reflections of contemporary computer technology. These ideological
transformations include changing assumptions about appropriate subjects for student
compositions, differing positions about the importance of grammatical correctness and
contemporary thinking about the extent to which writing is monologue or dialogue.
All of these ideological changes are integrally tied to shifts in higher and lower
educational philosophy in America.
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Writing in the Age of Email
I: Birds or Antrope