Making connections with new technologies
Sarah North
5.1 Introduction
This chapter examines the impact of communication technologies on the way we creatively deploy language resources. When a new communication technology first appears, it often stirs up controversy as to whether it will enrich or impoverish the language. Text messaging, for example, has received considerable media attention, and Activity 1 highlights some of the issues involved.
Views on texting
The extract below comes from a newspaper article which highlights concerns about the impact of text messaging technology on society What are your reactions to the issues it raises?

Comment
My own reaction to media reports of this incident was rather sceptical. Wou a secondary school student really have so little language awareness that she couldnt distinguish text messaging from essay style? I can’t help suspecting that rather than dashing off a sloppy piece of writing, the student crafted her homework knowingly, perhaps to enliven a boring assignment to wind up the teacher or even to experiment creatively with a new style. Whatever you may feel about English language standards in general, this article presents no hard evidence of harmful effects from text messaging. The spelling of their and there has long been a source of confusion for schoolchildren (and adults too for that mater), and exam candidates have always resorted to ingenious ways of abbreviating their answers when time starts to run out. Debates about freedom of expression versus standards of English raged long before text messaging was even dreamt of. So it seems that the article is blaming one particular technology for trends which may actually stem from a range of factors.
Over the centuries, humans have used various technological developments to help them communicate, ranging from clay tablets and quill pens to telephones and typewriters. The major development of recent years has been computer- mediated communication (CMC), which can be defined as ‘communication F... between human beings via the instrumentality of computers’ (Herring, 1996, p. 1), using a variety of different digital technologies, such as email,
newsgroups, online chat and instant messaging. Computer technology makes available an array of multimodal resources, which may involve not only written text, but other modes such as speech, music, and visual images. In this chapter, however, the focus is on text-based CMC — in particular, interactive communication in emails, text messaging, online chat and computer conferencing.
Discussion of CMC involves issues of mode and medium, terms which are used in different ways, sometimes interchangeably. In this chapter, I adopt the distinction drawn between them by Gunther Kress (2000). Mode relates to the means by which a message is represented, using for example the sounds of speech, the graphic system of writing or the gestures of sign language. Medium, on the other hand, relates to the means by which a message is transmitted. Speech, for example, could be transmitted through face-to-face conversation, a video-conferencing link or a telephone connection. Graphic symbols could be written in ink on paper, carved on stone, spray-painted on a wall or transmitted digitally via a computer.

A common stereotype represents computer users as isolated from society, spending long hours engrossed in surfing, chatting, gaming or hacking in the solitude of their own room. But no computer user is truly isolated, since the use of computer technology depends on the resources and opportunities provided by society. The way that individuals make use of any communication technology, whether ancient or modern, is affected by general features of the relationship between technology and society. In the first part of the chapter I will spend some time discussing the nature of this relationship, suggesting key issues that you will need to bear in mind later when considering how a communication technology might aid or impede creativity.
The remainder of the chapter will look at two aspects of creativity in CMC, one involving the introduction and spread of innovative ways of adapting to the new medium, and the other involving the artful deployment of existing language resources within the computer-mediated environment. Previous chapters have focussed more on artfulness, but in common use the term ‘creativity’ is often associated with novelty. By exploring the way that technology can stimulate novel uses of language, this chapter will also question whether novelty alone can he regarded as creative.
5.2 The impact of new technologies
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they
dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those
languages, or we remain mute.
(Ballard, 1974, Introduction to Crash)
Living with technoLogy _____
It is often claimed that computer technology is revolutionising our lives. How far has computer technology affected the kinds of communication you yourself are involved in? What do you do now that you (or your parents) would have done differently before recent advances in computer technology?
Comment
The most striking changes in my own life have been at worlc where a constant stream of email has displaced the handwritten memos that used to be part of the daily routine, and typewriters and stencil machines seem like antiques now that I can word-process a document, paste in downloaded graphics, and print multiple copies in a matter of minutes. Computer technology is also behind innovations in other aspects of my life, from the scanned photos or downloaded jokes emailed around family and friends, to the use of the internet to search a database or buy a train ticket Not everything has changed, though. Like many other people, I still make outlines and drafts on

paper print out information rather than reading it online, and scribble comments in the margin, just as I have always done. Your own experiences may not be the same as mine, but you may have identified some areas where the use of computer technology has changed the way you communicate and others where it has had less efFect.
One way of looking at the impact of new technologies is to consider their affordances. This term was first used by the psychologist Gibson (1986, p. 127) to refer to the possibilities that the environment offers to an animal. A tree, for example, affords perching to an eagle or resting in the shade to a lion. Affordances can be either negative or positive, and this will depend on the individual involved. For a human, water affords drinking and washing, but also drowning; for a fish, the affordances are quite different. As Gibson points out, an affordance may be present even though the observer fails to perceive it. For example, a baby may bang a spoon or chew a facecloth but a spoon still affords feeding and a facecloth still affords washing. Have you ever played one of those lateral thinking games where you have to think of as many uses as possible for a brick, or some such object? If so, what you were doing was listing the affordances of the object — the possibilities for action that it provides — however far-fetched some of those affordances might seem.
Affordances are properties of the environment, arising from its material characteristics. When we consider human actors, we need to take into account their effectivities. that is, ‘the dynamic capabilities of that individual taken with reference to a set of action-relevant properties of the environment’ (Zaff, 1995, p. 240). For example, a revolving door is designed to afford access to a building, but how far would it be accessible to a toddler, a wheelchair user or someone who had never seen one before? The use of any object, whether natural or produced by humans, depends not only on its affordances but also on the way these are perceived and interpreted by each individual. Although the nature of the object places some limits on how it may he used, it does not enforce uniform behaviour. In interacting with the environment, each of us brings to bear individual capabilities stemming from the experiences, resources and expectations provided by the culture in which we live. Technology is part of our environment, and the way we use it is affected by both its affordances and our own effectivities.
Who sets email style? (Reading A)
Reading A comes from an article by Naomi Baron which considers how language users adapt to new communication technologies by looking for guidance in the form of prescriptive rules, or by relying on their own coping strategies. In this extract, Naomi Baron examines how contemporary email usage has developed in the United States, and compares how the telegraph influenced language use in the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER 5 MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2
Now read ‘Who sets e-mail style? Prescriptivism, coping strategies, and democratizing communication access’ by Naomi Baron. As you do, note examples of features of the technology (alfordances), and characteristics of the users (effectivities), which may affect the use of email or other communication technologies.
Comment
Naomi Baron’s article is quite detailed, and there are a range of possible responses to this activity
Under features of the technology I noted: ease of access, speed of transmission, degree of privacy, ability to delete the message, size of the display screen, time-out disconnection and possibility of transmission errors.
Under characteristics of users, I noted: education level, literacy level, familiarity with letter-writing, conceptual models of speech and writing, effects of English composition teaching, and affective factors such as excitement with the new technology
The reading shows how, throughout history people have found ways of adapting to new communication technologies, but suggests that this may sometimes create a tension between ‘the excitement of linguistic freedom’ and ‘academically constructed standards for writing: Naomi Baron’s conclusion made me think back to the text message essay in Activity I (‘My smmr hols wr CWOT’), where the media focus on academic standards contrasted with my own view of the essay as playful, creative even, in the way it explorted the language of text messaging.
In some cases, it is possible to see a clear link between the affordances of the technology and the way it is used. For example, because computers typically have large display screens and QWERTY keyboards, they afford typing (and therefore longer messages) more easily than mobile phones. Because internet access is relatively cheap and there are no costs associated with distance or length of message, one of the things it affords is spamming. Although the transmission of unwanted advertising material may be a negative affordance for the receiver, it is obviously a positive affordance for the advertiser. Communication technologies certainly make things possible that used to be impossible or difficult. But how far do they revolutionise our lives?
Discussion about new technologies often swings from optimistic visions of a brave new world to gloomy predictions of decline and doom (Thurlow, 2003). Both these perspectives, however, share a similar view of technology itself as the driving force behind far-reaching changes in society or in individual behaviour. This position is known as technological determinism, which Chandler (1995) associates with a number of features, including:
• reductionism: the idea that complex issues can be simplified to a few basic factors;

• mechanism: the idea that social phenomena can be explained by regular
rules of cause and effect;
• technological autonomy; the idea that technology exists independently society.
The concept of technological determinism, however, is criticised by those J who argue that technology is not an external force producing social consequences, but that society and technology are inextricably intertwined. Consider, for example, a simple tool like a torch. It can affect some aspects of your life by allowing you to see in the dark, but only as long as the battery lasts. To keep it functioning, you need a society organised in such a way that batteries can be produced and distributed, and without those systems, anyone who invented a torch would have little prospect of seeing it make much impact on society. Even when a particular artefact does become widespread, there is no guarantee that it will be used in the way its designers intended. Frisbees, for example, are said to originate from the pie plates produced by the Frisbie Baking Company, who certainly didn’t anticipate that the undergraduates who ate their pies would then start skimming the plates through the air. So too, the internet itself was originally set up as a shared information space for government and academic institutions, with no thought of it developing into a means for millions of people to communicate through email, bulletin boards and chat. The impact of technology on society is clearly neither simple nor predictable.
The quotation from J.G. Ballard at the beginning of this section represents a deterministic viewpoint, with technology ‘dictating’ the way we speak and think. Naomi Baron’s article, on the other hand, draws attention to the way that our use of technology is affected by sociocultural factors. Rather than the nature of the technology driving email style, she views it as reinforcing trends already existing in society towards a more informal style of writing. Other language scholars also tend to favour a sociocultural approach to new technologies. As Susan Herring argues;
not all properties of [computer-mediated discourse] follow necessarily and directly from the properties of computer technology. Rather, social and cultural factors — carried over from communication in other media as well as internally generated in computer-mediated environments — contribute importantly to the constellation of properties that characterizes computer- mediated discourse.
(Herring, 2001, p. 625)
So far I have concentrated on the way that affordances and effectivities make things possible, but our use of technology is affected also by constraints which limit these possibilities (Norman, 1999). Some constraints are physical; for example, your ability to carry a suitcase will depend on how heavy it is. Within CMC, the computer keyboard presents a number of physical constraints which have implications for equality of access to computer

CHAPTER 5 MAKING CONNECTIONS WITH NEW TECHNOLOGIES

technology. Since computers transmit information digitally, the symbols we use in writing have to be converted into a numeric code. The code first developed was ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), which allowed for 12g characters, of which half were reserved for letters (32 upper case and 32 lower case). Computer keyboards were originally designed for use with ASCII, making them ill adapted for languages that require more than 32 characters. Countries such as China and Japan use basically the same keyboards as in the west, but since their script cannot be matched directly to the keys, typing requires special software and more complicated input methods. Such constraints may have an effect on the nature of CMC; one research study, for example, found that in English, Japanese and Korean online environments, the way that participants adapted their writing practices to the new medium was influenced by the word- processing technology and the writing system (Fouser et al. 2000). Notice though that these influences involved not only the physical constraints of the technology, but also the cultural constraints of the script.
While physical constraints can be seen as the converse of affordances (both relate to the material environment), cultural constraints derive from shared cultural conventions; unlike physical constraints, they can, in theory, be violated. For example, English is written from left to right, but there is nothing to stop me from picking up my pen and writing in the other direction, as Arabic is written. The direction of handwriting is a cultural constraint. But cultural conventions may be built into the technology: my word-processing software, for example, forces me to type from left to right, even if I want to type in Arabic. In such cases, cultural constraints become materialised as physical constraints. The increasing global standardisation of electronic environments can be problematic for languages which are less dominant in these environments. As Koutsogiannis (2004, p. 175) points out in relation to Greek, ‘the semiotic resources with which the new technology is equipped are alien to both the history and the culture of these societies’.
It would he a mistake, though, to focus only on the negative aspects of physical and cultural constraints. The English, Japanese and Korean participants in the study by Fouser et al. may have responded differently to the online environment, hut none of them found it impossible to adapt their language to the medium. In fact, the constraints could themselves be seen as conducive to creativity, eliciting the skills needed to exploit the medium effectively.

Constraints and affordances together mark out the scope for creativity, not only in relation to computer-mediated communication, but with respect to any technology. As McCullough argues:
the word affordance implies a finite budget of opportunities, and so it is complemented with the idea of ‘constraint’. For a medium must also have limits. It is not too difficult to imagine that an unconstrained medium would have little identity. Presumably it would be unpleasant. Being able to do whatever one wants does not induce creativity so much as paralysis. But in reality, there is no ultimate medium. Constraints define specific formal possibilities and guide creativity into specific channels, much like banks define a river.
In other words, constraint is a source of strength. [...] Only through the possibilities and limitations of structured substance does expression come into being — otherwise it remains only inspiration.
(McCullough, 1996, p. 199)
McCullough’s argument suggests that creativity involves working with the medium, as a carpenter works with the grain of the wood. Working with a new medium may require adapting existing practices in order to exploit its affordances and constraints. The next section will move on to consider the ways in which people have adapted to the new medium of computer- mediated communication, and the extent to which this has involved creative use of language.
5.3 Adapting to change
The poetry of text
While the text message school essay quoted in Activity I earned only media condemnation, the following poem by Hetty Hughes won first prize in a text message poetry competition run by the British newspaper The Guardian. What features do you think make it poetic? How far has the writer succeeded in working with the affordances and constraints of texting?
txtin iz messin,
ml headn’ me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsecl w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she’s african
(Keegan, The Guardian, 3 May, 2001)