I can’t remember when I first used an internet search engine, but it certainly wasn’t Google. The Google search engine was launched in 1997, and now to many internet users ‘search engine’ means Google and nothing else. Google’s unofficial slogan, suggested by Paul Buchheit who was the lead developer of their webmail service Gmail, is ‘Don’t be evil’. Yet in the eyes of some critics the company’s pre-eminence makes it distinctly sinister – in principle, even if not in practice. The French historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney, who from 2002 to 2007 was president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, has attacked Google’s decision to digitize the holdings of a number of important British and American libraries. Jeanneney has argued that this project threatens to unleash an avalanche of English-language data on the internet, and that this could dramatically skew future generations’ idea of the world.
Electronic media have changed the rhythms of living. Barriers to communication have been removed: information flows more freely and inexpensively (and leaks more, too), and people and organizations who might never before have had the chance to interact feel connected. Furthermore, we are able to shape the information we exchange: everything can be digitized, and everything that has been digitized can be transformed. We see more, we hear more, and we feel … less? The devices we now use to communicate promise greater immediacy, but they can make depth seem shallow, intimacy alien, transparency opaque. Sven Birkerts has argued that ‘To represent experience as a shaded spectrum, we need the subtle shading instruments of language’, and without what he calls ‘the refinements of verbal style’ there is a risk that we may ‘condition ourselves into a kind of low-definition consciousness’. He suggests that ‘the knowledge mode now preferred in our culture is one that combines externality with a sophisticated awareness of interconnectedness. Interiority … and the more spiritual resonances are suspect.’4
Certainly one of the effects of electronic media has been to turn up the noise levels in our daily lives. Sustained attention has become more difficult. The selective process of listening is losing ground to hearing – something we cannot turn on and off. Culturally, we are programmed to understand the world in strongly visual terms – you see what I mean, I get the picture – and when we are bombarded with sounds our visual understanding is jarred. Notions of space are jolted, and so are our ideas of time. To put matters in stridently disturbing terms, the concept of a private mind is becoming less stable; increasingly, we participate in the functions of a collective mind, borrowing other people’s subjectivity. The media scholar Derrick de Kerckhove speaks of ‘the globalization of our personal psychology’ and ‘our new, electronic common sense’ which is ‘no more within ourselves, but without’. He concludes that ‘A new human is in the making’.5 In 2006 Time magazine announced its Person of the Year: ‘You’. The ‘You’ thus canonized was presented as the almighty controller of the information age. But the experience of being in control leaves many of us exhausted – physically, emotionally, socially, intellectually.
The consequences for language are palpable. In the electronic society, everything has to be accelerated. Words, which have to be used in a linear fashion, frequently cede ground to images. On the internet capital letters and verbs are apt to disappear, along with punctuation – question and exclamation marks are retained and indeed sometimes laid on extra-thick, but commas evaporate. Writing on web pages often mimics spoken forms, and the customary stability of the written word is undermined as pages are edited or vaporized. Communication is neither speech nor writing as we conventionally understand them, and it is staccato. Abbreviations are rife. At the same time there are creative misspellings and wilful, playful grammatical goofs, as well as multitudes of new words. There is more linguistic variety, a greater degree of hybridity, a faster propagation of novelties. A further, loosely related point: the credibility of websites is judged according to the way they look more than on the strength of who created them, and there is a clear difference between what may be called information literacy and the ability to evaluate the quality of information that’s available.
There are people who speak English who have no access to the new technology, so the changes I am talking about do not affect everyone who uses the language. But the chances are that they have affected you. Developments on the internet mean that right now there are significant changes afoot in the ways we think about work, business, privacy, sex, ownership, authorship, copyright, knowledge, community, morality and indeed ourselves. In these areas our use of language is altering, and so is our idea of what ‘language’ means.
The notion that everything can be translated into information – or that whatever cannot has no real value – eats away at the richness of existence. In their thoughtful book The Social Life of Information, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid suggest that ‘some of the attempts to squeeze everything into an information perspective recall the work of the Greek mythological bandit Procrustes … [who] stretched travellers who were too short and cut off the legs of those who were too long until all fitted his bed.’6 It is a mistake to think that all of our organic experience can be crammed into hierarchical data structures.
Activity on the internet today comprises a huge assortment of informal conversations. These conversations often resemble marketplaces, and theirs is a culture in which rumour is indistinguishable from reality and in which memories are short. Whereas conversations that happen face-to-face involve subtle effects of intonation, posture, gesture and gaze, virtual conversations lack these extra layers of information. I am sure you have had the experience of being misinterpreted because a message you sent online did not convey those additional nuances. Emoticons (such as :-D to suggest a big grin) have developed as a way of making up for some of this loss, or of averting misunderstanding of one’s mood and tone. But they are crude, and they are often misunderstood. In the virtual world, besides missing the non-verbal envelope in which we package our words, we lose the benefits of simultaneous feedback, the information you provide, a bit like a commentary, when I am speaking to you in person. Even if I am video-conferencing, rather than just exchanging emails or posts on a message board, elements of my non-verbal communication will be unclear.
‘Communication’ is coming up repeatedly here, with good reason. It is one of the keywords of our age. We are in the midst of a new literacy. There is a huge amount of writing being done, if not perhaps quite so much reading. We write a great deal about ourselves, and do so as a way of socializing. Text messages, emails, the little notes people leave on Facebook, the snippets of autobiography and comment posted on Twitter – these call for ingenuity, an ability to say a lot succinctly. They also require careful thought about appropriateness. Sometimes there is not enough forethought; we have all sent a message into the aether that we have later had cause to regret. Conversely, though, consider the number of times you have punctiliously reworded a text message or email in the interests of brevity, clarity, crispness and wit. All the while another kind of writing is booming: a new, unlimited, expository prose, seen for instance on blogs, which allows even shy people to be exhibitionists. Blogs, which are in most cases unmoderated, suit people who hold extreme views that they would have trouble broadcasting through traditional media. They empower individuals. But their content is treated differently from the content of, say, a printed magazine. In the blogosphere, it seems, writing suffers less than reading.
Online, anonymity is easy. In discussion forums this can make for a vociferousness about inflammatory issues. The feminist writer Jessica Valenti has suggested that at its worst this can mutate into ‘an almost gang rape-like mentality’.7 In our online experience, we may feel less accountable for what we say. We may also feel less accountable for what we look at. The internet is changing perceptions of what is offensive. This is not the place for an extended meditation on the way the availability on the internet of pornography is changing sexual tastes and behaviours, or indeed to comment on the other ways in which the internet has enabled new sexual behavio
urs. What is clear, though, is that the internet accustoms us quickly to new sights and sounds.
One of the great rewards of wired life – and of its increasingly common successor, wireless life – is rapid access to information. Another is rapid access to people. But this does have some disadvantages. Electronic communication can seem perfunctory and unappreciative, and it can be dangerously hasty. Text messaging illustrates the benefits and the drawbacks, and has become a bugbear of those who worry about the decline of English. They grouse about SMS language, in which ‘u k m8’ stands for ‘Are you okay, mate?’ and Hamlet’s most famous line becomes ‘2b/-2b=?’ Writing in the Daily Mail in 2007, John Humphrys condemned texters as ‘vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.’ Their vices included ‘savaging our sentences’ and ‘raping our vocabulary’.8 I am reminded of Lord Reith’s equally disproportionate comparison in the late 1950s between commercial television and ‘smallpox, bubonic plague and the Black Death’.9 The truth is that the majority of texters do not employ the most extreme abbreviations – the elliptical textspeak cited by its critics – and the use of abbreviations is hardly something new. It is a myth that large numbers of schoolchildren use these condensed expressions in their written work, and in any case the heyday of extreme textspeak may well have passed; many phones now have full QWERTY keyboards, and prolific texters are able to secure cheap deals that allow them to send unlimited texts. As a result there is less use of abbreviation than when text messaging began, since typing messages is easier and the cost of exceeding the 160-character limit has for many users become nil. In any case, the mangled spellings and dodgy grammar of texts are frequently deliberate. Taking delight in linguistic deviancy is not the same in fact or in spirit as Genghis Khan’s genocidal purging of 20 million people. It is absurd to imagine that the average person sending a text message – which is often done while half-occupied with something else – cannot distinguish between the language used for this purpose and the language to be used in an essay or report.
Yet John Humphrys rightly detects what he calls ‘an erosion of formality’. Elsewhere he avows, ‘Formality matters. It creates a space between us that allows for a measure of independence and freedom. Take it away and that space is open to all manner of intruders.’ Instead of formality we now tend to have ‘enforced intimacy’.10 Real intimacy is something to cherish, but enforced intimacy, besides being embarrassing, has the side effect of permitting a general relaxation of informativeness. The strenuous chumminess of TV news reporting is a case in point. It seems to be terribly important for us to know that the presenters in the studio are on first-name terms with the reporters shivering or sweltering in the field, and the public’s opinions are eagerly canvassed, though they contain no surprises – people are unhappy about a rail strike, saddened by the death of a public figure, gutted about a football defeat, outraged by spending cuts, bored by electioneering. All of this occupies space that might more fruitfully be given over to exposition of the facts.
There is widespread aversion to behaviour that appears starchy. Some of what we have done away with really was just empty ceremony, but formality is not intrinsically coercive or disagreeable, and it can be pleasurable. Do you remember the days when you got dressed up to go out for dinner or to the theatre? If you do, and if you live in Britain, you’re almost certainly over the age of forty. There are situations where formality creates symmetry and is equalizing rather than divisive. Yet often, if we behave formally, we are made to feel stodgy or creepy. I can remember being an object of ridicule when, in my twenties, I put on a suit and tie for a job interview. One of my interviewers made sure I could see he was wearing a pair of soiled trainers – a blazon of his liberal values. Today the formality described above will to many people seem weird. Formality in general has been relinquished. Thomas de Zengotita calls this ‘the rise of the casual’.11 In language, as in clothes, it is conspicuous. Letters I receive from strangers begin not with the words ‘Dear Mr Hitchings’, but with ‘Dear Henry Hitchings’, ‘Dear Henry’ or ‘dear hitchings’: emails from people I know just slightly are even more relaxed, opening ‘Hiya H’, ‘hitch –’ or even ‘m8’, though there are occasional and surprising archaisms, including the marvellous ‘Respected Sir’.
Not so long ago ‘Respected Sir’ – used by a correspondent who had English only as his third or fourth language – would not have seemed odd. Traditional forms of linguistic politeness have fallen into disuse. Egalitarianism and terms of deference are incompatible. Prime Minister Tony Blair was mocked by traditionalists for saying ‘Call me Tony’, though in fact he did not utter these words; by contrast, his doughy successor Gordon Brown really did introduce himself to staff at 10 Downing Street with the instruction ‘Call me Gordon’. Up until the 1970s an adult male would in many far from ceremonial situations have been addressed by his surname alone, and at my boarding school in the early 1980s I was invariably addressed in this way. Now this use of surnames rather than given names is a mark of affected stiffness or Wodehousian banter, and the affectation is usually recognized on both sides. One member of staff at the British Library, where I am writing these words, calls me ‘Hitchings’ rather than ‘Mr Hitchings’ with an archness that is, I think, a joke, though at whose expense I cannot be sure. Tellingly, some of my friends cannot spell my surname correctly, having rarely seen it written down. Contrary to what some Britons claim, Americans tend to have held on to a little more of this courtliness.
The rise of the casual manifests itself in an inability (which may be interpreted as either ignorance or unwillingness) to perceive the nuances of social situations. Politeness, that middle ground between civility and courtesy, is to a large degree a behaviour achieved through language. While it can hardly be considered dead, it has been supplanted by the vapid notion of ‘respect’, which combines timorous deference with a hollow mateyness – and has enjoyed some extra exposure as the name of a broadly socialist British political party. It is frequently suggested that traditional British reserve has been superseded by rudeness. We recognize, perhaps with pain but perhaps with a certain macabre relish, Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate’s sweary grandmother with her catchphrase ‘What a load of old shit!’ But is the behaviour we condemn as lack of restraint and roiling incivility symptomatic of social decline? Or does it suggest something else – maybe the triumph of democracy? Whatever.
Ah, whatever. ‘I don’t really think that dress is appropriate,’ says Concerned Parent. To which her child responds, ‘Whatever.’ Is this dismissive, apathetic, calculatedly disengaged? What’s for sure is that whatever drives a great many people nuts. Sometimes it means something akin to ‘Yes, that’s what I said’; at other times it is equivalent to ‘Have it your way’. Alarmists suggest that the commonness of whatever is an indication of a new lassitude: the headline might read, ‘Young people do not care any more.’ One American academic, Naomi Baron, has latched on to the ubiquity of the word, writing of The ‘Whatever’ Generation. She suggests that digital technology has created a nomadic culture in which people simply do not set much store by using language clearly. She also diagnoses what she calls ‘the end of anticipation’: we save up fewer of our experiences for discussion when we meet face-to-face. Baron suggests that the next few decades will see standards of spelling and punctuation revert to levels ‘redolent of the quasi-anarchy of medieval and even Renaissance England’, and that there will be ‘a diminution in the role of writing as a medium for clarifying thought’. Language, she thinks, will play less of a role in marking its users’ social status.12 Baron does not insist on these predictions; they are simply ‘plausible’. Yet she does argue, like Sven Birkerts, that being ‘always on’, perpetually connected, compromises our ability to be reflective. We are saturated with information, and that makes it harder for us to know our selves.
We do not have to be ‘always on’. But we can lose sight of this truth. A friend of mine, a workah
olic writer, returned from a holiday to report that he had been unable to use his phone or connect to the internet in the remote community where he had stayed. ‘It was bliss,’ he told me. ‘For a few days I was just me.’ As he said this, his body spasmed in Pavlovian response to the cheeping of his iPhone. This disharmony is fascinating. Or perhaps I should bring into play the current smart term: not disharmony, but disconnect. When Naomi Baron pictures a world in which we do not care about language, what she’s really imagining is a world where we have no idea of how to take care of ourselves.
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‘Conquer English to Make China Strong’
The globalization of English
No language has spread as widely as English, and it continues to spread. Internationally the desire to learn it is insatiable. In the twenty-first century the world is becoming more urban and more middle class, and the adoption of English is a symptom of this, for increasingly English serves as the lingua franca of business and popular culture. It is dominant or at least very prominent in other areas such as shipping, diplomacy, computing, medicine and education. A recent study has suggested that among students in the United Arab Emirates ‘Arabic is associated with tradition, home, religion, culture, school, arts and social sciences’, whereas English ‘is symbolic of modernity, work, higher education, commerce, economics and science and technology’.1 In Arabic-speaking countries, science subjects are often taught in English because excellent textbooks and other educational resources are readily available in English. This is not something that has come about in an unpurposed fashion; the propagation of English is an industry, not a happy accident.
The Language Wars Page 36