Analyzing online language (Jones & Hafner, Activity 5.1)

There is a pretty solid hierarchy of formality in digital interactions.  What passes for acceptable language between close friends in a private chat may not pass the standards of an email between work colleagues.  I see a general trend of text messages at the most casual end of the spectrum, with emails at the most formal end.  Text messages are typically between close acquaintances, and are often one-on-one.  Since they take place on each participant’s phones, they are also very private.  This makes texts a common medium for abbreviations, creative spelling, and emoticons.  The assumed closeness of text participants makes them most likely to understand each other’s idiosyncratic digital speech patterns.

I would place instant messaging right next to texts in formality.  These have all the same constraints as texts, except that they can also take place on desktop computers.  This makes instant messages slightly less private.  They’re probably used more commonly than texts as a way for work colleagues to communicate.  Facebook wall posts are tricky to place.  They can include a lot of short forms that most readers may not understand, but I think the larger audience (all of a Facebook user’s Friends) enforces a standard of formality.  Facebook posts are not private conversations, but they are between social relations and are relatively short-form.

At the far end of formality are emails.  Emails could be between close friends who would understand abbreviations and emoticons, but there are better forms of communication to convey that language.  I generally understand emails to be reserved for long-form communication, regardless of the audience.  Emails can convey complicated information, so they assume a stricter standard than more-constrained forms like texts and instant messages.  In this sense, it is the potential media richness of an email that dictates its language.

Below is a snippet of text conversation between myself and a friend, where I’ve highlighted the abbreviations, non-standard spellings, and emoticons.

Me: Whatcha up to tonight?

Them: Makin pizza dough right now but I wanna hang fo sho! You??

Heading to [a bar] for [a friend]’s roommate’s going away party.

Sounds like fun

Were in the basement if you wanna join.

You sure??

I won’t be imposing?

Of course not.

Kk ill be there in a few :D

Most of the non-standard spellings are just contractions (e.g. “whatcha” for “what are you”), while “fo sho” is a slang form of “for sure.”  Being followed by an exclamation point, it imparts not just informality, but an excitement and jauntiness that “for sure” may not convey.  I’ve never quite figured out a consistent logic behind double question marks, but I take them to mean a slightly more pleading question.  In this conversation, they may mean that if I were listening to my friend, their voice would rise slightly higher or be drawn out a little longer when asking those questions.  The emoticon at the end of the last text frames the message in a context of happy excitement, as opposed to a simple statement of intent to be somewhere in a few minutes.

Dissecting a conversation like this reminds me how I take for granted my ability to read this person’s intents in what are only a few dozen text characters.  I may misunderstand the same language coming from someone else, or my friend may communicate in a completely different way in an email.  The intended meanings arise out of nothing but the digital context and the relationship between the participants.