Page 42 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 33
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interactions and the opportunity for the listeners/ communication partners to
give immediate feedback to the speaker”, in this sense, conversational writing
is most unlike its traditional predecessor. In the new millennium, emails and
blogs are the everyday examples of conversational writing.
Content and genre present special problems for comparative media
work, any conclusions deduced from textual analysis must only reflect
structural features of the medium, such as specific conventions and
communicative practices, rather than content features of it. The importance of
structural inference can be illustrated in a simple example. Let us imagine a
(flawed) comparison of print versus orality by means of examining five
works of each. Our sample from print media, in other words, would comprise
five novels and our oral sample, five transcripts transcribed from legal cases
argued in a court of law. This assessment, after statistical analysis, would
lead us to infer almost inescapably that print media are more ‘romantic’ and
that orality, on the other hand, is more ‘factual’. But this fallacy of inference
would reflect the nature of the samples utilized for each medium rather any
features inherent in how the medium is itself rhetorically structured. In
seeking to establish objective differences of communicative practice between
media, therefore, we must choose criteria that are independent of special
content-level features such as “factuality” or “romance”, for factuality is not
intrinsic to any medium (would that it were so). We must, therefore, confine
ourselves to comparing media on strictly structural features that may emerge
from communicative practices within them. And the structural characteristics
must be present in all the media under scrutiny. Three such structural features
present themselves without content bias: sentence length, pronoun usage, and
lexical density, as defined next.
If, as research cited in the Characteristics of Literacy table suggests,
written text possesses unique structural characteristics: concise use of syntax
and ideas and cohesion based on linguistic markers, then the prime measure
by which we might compare communicative differences between text, orality,
and conversational writing is the word length of the average sentence in each
medium. If the belief is that oral media are more diffuse, “rambling”, free
than print-based ones, we ought to expect longer sentences from the
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former , , . Intuitively, it is reasonable to construe the length of sentences in
one medium or genre as being radically different than in another, for, why
should they be the same?
Similarly, a second criterion, relative pronoun usage, is also worth
exploring across media. Measuring the extent of pronoun usage across
different media would indicate the degree to which speakers or writers are
“close to the text” by way of direct reference, and may justify approaching
the question of whether one medium is in general more impersonal than
another. Again, the instinctive hypothesis might be that orality is more
informal and therefore more “personal” or intimate than text, and that