Page 40 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 31
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observational data to support or refute theoretical claims, but this has not
materialized. Considering that the operational nature and environment of
digital text connects transparently to its archival, which is the task of
innumerable server logs and search engine indexes, any paucity of systematic
studies of data and material produced within and through the digital medium
is nothing less than surprising. And it is not entirely clear what useful
inferences can be drawn from much of what does exist, certainly stylistic
knowledge – knowledge of what and how authors are creating online, and
how the conventions adopted and evolving in their medium compare with
those long established in the world of print – does not appear to be the focus
of such analyses. One would, for instance, like to observe whether stylistic
practices in the new medium conform to conventional modes of print-based
writing: is there consensus on the length of sentences between both
conventional and conversational writing? If conversational writing derives
attributes from orality (i.e., Ferris’s observation that “electronic writing is
characterized by the use of oral conventions over traditional conventions, of
argument over exposition, and of group thinking over individual thinking” is
representative of this belief), how significant and present are these in any
digital corpus, such as an online discussion group, or a library of similar
communications documents? This invokes the idea of a spectrum of
communicative modes ranging from most to least “formal” along lexical and
semantic criteria, which I will explore next.

Informal Modes Formal Modes

Orality Conversational text: Print-based
Spoken emails, blogs, etc works
genres

Figure 5. Spectrum of oral-literal communicative modes
Let us establish the first dimension of an analytic framework that
qualitatively incorporates the different forms of writing we wish to compare.
We first assume, along with the general academic consensus, that print-
oriented or traditional writing stands in structural contrast with oral
communication–this point has been navigated throughout an entire literature
and, as mentioned earlier, Janzen-Wilde’s relatively early work drew relevant
conclusions for comparative media, between literacy and facilitated
communication, in a meta-analysis of research, summarized in tables 1 and 2.