Page 34 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 25
______________________________________________________________
its discrete object of delivery and has for its part also aggressively controlled
the time and space available to expression, by limiting the coverage of stories
in scope and length. In doing this, it has also demanded tacit agreement with
the politics of the sponsorship model that subsidizes commercial broadcast
institutions. And for their own part as well, the voice of many digital media
forms, while transcending political restrictions, have also been hampered by
bandwidth and detailed technical limitations. In each case, we might now ask
whether the medium is the message or rather governs it.
From the foregoing, we might take it that the expressive potential of
a medium is defined by its interface and manner of consumption, which is to
say that the expressive potential of a medium is realized in its use. As an
exploration in this line of inquiry, I conducted 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). The
results of quantitative measures on usage data found significant similarities,
and differences, in lexical expressive practice across these genres. While
mean sentence length remained exactly the same regardless of whether the
utterance was found in speech, printed in a book, or posted online, there was
substantial variation 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 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), were
statistically located at the median between oral and print forms.
This might not be an unintuitive finding; the practice of writing,
always in flux, has over the last two decades been particularly impacted by
the emergence of digital innovations in new text genres, chiefly, email
messages, newsgroup postings, and weblogs. Many of the compositional
practices of conventional (that is, print-intended) writing - the sense of a
linear structure comprising a beginning, middle, and end, for example – fell
into muted crisis in the new medium. In the manifest difference between
physical and digital media, digital genres have evolved into environments
that encourage the substitution of many established structural authorial
conventions for the more convenient parameters offered by interfaces and
tools embedded in the interactive genre. Length of written work, to evoke one
measure, is one of the attributes in greatest deviation. The essay or chapter is
practically non-existent in a medium that by nature emphasizes less the
exposition of larger-scale topics than the assertion of, and reaction to,
specific, closely circumscribed points. There are, to be sure, compound
structures in digital writing, the canonical example being the case of
discussion list threads, essentially a conversation (or various) structured
around a question-and-answer or declaration-and-response built up from