Page 49 - Cyberculture and New Media

40 Formalisms of Digital Text
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emphasize the dependence of text on neighbouring non-textual elements for
completeness of meaning. This fragmentary expression has become standard
practice in blog writing. Typically, the fragment-caption will be a sentence
missing either the verb, e.g., “Lots of diggers”, “Myself with a very good
find”, “picture of beetle bug” or the subject, e.g., “Screening ore”.
However, the results of sentence length, which show conversational
writing to be of similar length as the oral utterance, does not transfer to the
case of pronoun usage (see Figure 9).

Pronoun Usage

14.0% 13.1%
12.1%
12.0% 11.1%
10.0% 9.1%

8.0%
Pronoun Usage
6.0%
4.0%

2.0%
0.0%
text speech email blogs

Figure 7. Relative pronoun usage in text, speech, email, and blog samples
The downward frequency slope illustrates that the literary and
expository forms understood by the label “text” employ more pronouns than
blogs or email samples, and approximates only speech in frequency of use.
This runs counter to generally accepted arguments of orality versus literacy,
with conversational writing synthesizing elements of both. However,
arguments around an orality-literacy opposition so often associated first with
12 13 14
Marshall McLuhan , and later with Walter Ong and Jack Goody did not
arise in the full bloom of new media nor aim at modernity’s digital textuality,
and consequently they do not examine the new conventions of merging text
with temporal and graphical forms in a dynamic medium. When text
accompanies an image, the deixis between both is transmodal, which is to
say, not merely textual. In the presence of an image a text that describes or