Page 33 - Cyberculture and New Media

24 Formalisms of Digital Text
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would have been extensively edited, and lowest for speech, which reflects its
improvisatory nature. Blogs and emails, which share characteristics of both
(given that these digital genres are written like print but improvised and
unedited like speech)

2. Primary distinctions
I open my topic with an exploratory notion: if there are detectable,
structurally predetermined information variabilities across different media or
genres, what are the forms of this variation? Empirical evidence
demonstrating a given utterance to be more or less information-rich
depending on whether it were spoken, printed on a page, or written online
would prove the significance of a medium or form of presentation as a
collaborator in inflecting expression. Information science already accepts that
print’s unique process of revision renders its content more lexically dense
than that of speech. It is thus generally assumed that, in a complexity-of-
language spectrum, print would lie on the pole of highest density, while
speech would be positioned at its opposite, more diffuse end. The findings in
the present study place show that online writing, which borrows heavily from
both expressive modalities, falls provably between both.
Precedents for the notion I first broached - that where one expresses
something changes how it expressed - are anchored in various fields, from the
controversies of the anthropological Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic
relativism, asserting as it does that thinking is structured differently in
response to the unique structure and terminological emphases of the
speaker’s language, out to the contemporary discovery of media as an object
of study, the field singularly pioneered, though unsystematically, by Marshall
McLuhan. The history of language variation formerly known as historical
linguistics, founded on an expansive prospect that could accommodate the
word’s entanglement with modern, industrialized techniques for its
propagation, takes its starting point at the pummel of the first printing press
and culminates in a redirection that has become entangled within the
accelerating project of all media evolution, the stylisation and broadcasting of
language through transmissive mechanisms. In the proliferation of such
mechanisms, meaning, originally shared in a purely embodied manner,
became inextricably tied to technical methods of reproduction. As the
practice of language became incrementally absorbed within the affordances
and conditions of the means of its production, each medium,
indistinguishable from the institutions that operated it, stipulated conditions
on the potential realization of the word - newspapers offered expressive
possibilities to the correspondent; possibilities that were, however,
circumscribed by specific journalistic stylistic standards and strict word
counts. Broadcast media, too, rather than serve exclusively as passive conduit
for communication at the cultural level, evolved the “encapsulated story” as