Page 38 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 29
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meta-analyses of oral and mediated communication of Lori Janzen-Wilde as
early as 1993, just as new media communication was acquiring global
prevalence. Surveying the nascent landscape of multimodal communication,
she was the first to notice that lying entirely neither in print-based nor orally
based genres, mediated communication synthesizes equally from both and
exhibits “characteristics typically assigned to both ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ ends of
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the continuum” .
It is the features of this style that have incubated within digital
media that are the foundation of many suppositions equal to those of the
effects of the medium on “traditional” writing. Special “mechanics”, unique
this new style, are worked out through the lexical characteristics that reflect
the degree of orality implicit in the medium, amenable to study in a
diachronic manner. That is, displacing literariness, the orality of this mode is,
over time, increasingly encoded both for visual prominence and lexical
conciseness:

The oral conventions are evident in the way people subvert
or abandon traditional conventions of grammar and
punctuation in electronic writing. Meaning is very often
conveyed by cues recognized only by users of computer-
mediated communication. Some examples are acronyms
like BTW (by the way) and IMO (in my opinion), and
specialized use of typography -- for example, *word* to
signify italics and the use of nonverbal icons or emoticons
like a smiley face :-) -- which differ from traditionally
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recognized textual cues.

Another relation justifies the popular belief in significant differences
between oral, written, and online modes of communication: the production of
digital textuality in relation to what we might term a principle of
commitment. To consider the conditions of speech is to accept evanescent,
improvisatory modes of expression literally projected into the air. Everything
more or less spontaneous in this sense is enclosed within the utterance. To
produce writing, on the other hand, necessitates an engagement toward
preparatory organizational work and editing prior to “committing” expression
to paper, its physical support. We could see these practices as two ends of a
spectrum, and see in electronic writing a middle ground with sufficient
latitude to draw arbitrarily from each pole. Here, any resemblance to print
text emerges from the common lexical nature of both: words uniformly
arranged on a visual medium. The contrast however, is equally significant,
for, as with air, the digital medium is entirely unstable, and its production is
sufficiently provisional that textual operations based on structural
organization, prewriting, and detailed editing run against its aleatory spirit.