Page 32 - Cyberculture and New Media

Formalisms of Digital Text

Francisco J. Ricardo

Abstract
Critical discussions of online communication typically assume the
presence of variations in language use in digital media versus traditional
literature or real-time conversation. However, as there is little actual research
to corroborate this claim, the question arises: what evidence exists to justify
the claim that people communicate differently using digital media than in
writing or in person? This is a comparative study of several measures of
communicative practice across a variety of literary and speech genres, digital
and embodied. It explores oral and written expression through media use as
the manipulation of formal language components and affordances of a
medium or genre in connection with notions of spoken or written style. A
comparative analysis of sentence usage in four different communicative
forms - blogs, emails, printed text, and actual speech shows that, while mean
sentence length remained statistically equal in speech, book print, or online
postings, substantial variation, as measured by lexical density, was found in
the actual richness of language employed across these forms. While
empirical in structure, this analysis is intended as a contribution to critical
theory on digital media’s expressive forms and uses.

Key Words: Comparative linguistics, media theory.

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1. Introduction
With particular relevance to the communicative affordances of new
media, it could be argued that the expressive possibilities of any medium are
defined by its prevalent manner of consumption, which, to posit a paraphrase
to Ludwig Wittgenstein, is to say that the expressive potential of a medium is
realized in its use. The present study explores oral and written expression
through media use as the manipulation of formal language components and
affordances of a medium or genre in connection with spoken or written style.
It presents a comparative analysis of sentence usage in four different
communicative forms - blogs, emails, printed text, and actual speech (which I
will call genres for a unified term) - across which significant similarities, and
differences, in lexical expressive practice were measured. Results show that,
while mean sentence length remained unchanged in speech, book print, or
online post, substantial variation was found in the richness of language
employed, as defined by the lexical density metric used in computational
linguistics. This density was highest for printed text, which presumably