Language & Technology

Introduction

This guide is written for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) syllabuses in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science.

What do the examiners say about this subject?

Language and technology is one of the subjects studied within the broader area of Language and Social Contexts, which is set as a module for study within the specification for the AQA's Advanced Level (GCE AS and A2) Specification B for English Language. If you are a student taking this course, or a teacher giving support to such students, you may find the examiners' guidance helpful. But it may also be useful to anyone who wishes to understand how language relates to modern communication technologies.

In giving guidance to people studying the subject, the examiners advise them to study: the variety of language forms insofar as they are affected by

  • the technological medium used for communication (e.g. telephone, radio, television, computer);
  • the social functions that such media perform in both interpersonal and mass communication;
  • historical and contemporary changes, where appropriate.

In particular, the guidance says, candidates should examine

  • everyday functions and activities in context
  • discourse features.

In their support materials the examiners add this:

"For the purposes of [their assessment module] Language and Technology means language and communication technology… The focus is on how information and communication technology augments, constrains and simulates human-to-human communication…"

The examiners suggest that candidates should consider:

  • advantages, sometimes called affordances or potential capabilities, enabled by such technology;
  • constraints, as in entering text on a phone or keyboard;
  • how technologies such as text chat and answer phone messages show features of interaction more commonly associated with spoken conversation.

The examiners note that academic research into this area of language use is still in its early stages, and that what is published may not be reliable. But at the same time, there is very wide use of the technologies of communication. For this reason, investigations of text messages and instant messenger conversations, carried out by students (perhaps for another assessment module) are as likely to be reliable as published books. There are more resources available for the study of (spoken) telephone conversations, radio phone-ins and sports commentaries - transcripts of which have appeared as data in examination papers on the current specification and the similar syllabus that preceded it.

The examiners advise teachers to use varied types of text in presenting the subject. These might, for example, include:

  • transcripts and written records of actuality;
  • accounts of popular attitudes in print media;
  • examples of represented text (such as invented e-mail messages in fiction and advertising), and
  • excerpts from any investigations, including those done by students.

The examiners provide some examples of questions, including texts of these types, with an expert commentary, and a preceding caution: that they are not to be taken as model questions. On the other hand, the commentary is a good indication of what an informed response would ideally include. A second caution stresses the need for balanced answers - general comment needs to be related to specific details in the texts, while attention to these specific details needs to be illuminated by reference to theory and general ideas about language that they exemplify or challenge.

What is technology?

"The medium is the message". Marshall McLuhan

It's not necessary to start here, but in order to understand the connection of language and technology it may be helpful to arrive at a working description of what technology is. Here are some dictionary entries for technology:

1. Theoretical knowledge of industry and the industrial arts.
2. The application of science to the arts.
Funk and Wagnall's New Practical Standard Dictionary, New York, 1946
Science of the industrial arts; practical arts collectively.
Pocket Oxford Dictionary, Oxford, 1969
The methods for using scientific discoveries for practical purposes, esp. in industry
Cambridge Dictionary of American English, Cambridge, 2002
Knowledge, equipment, and methods that are used in science and industry.
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, 2002
New machines, equipment and ways of doing things that are based on modern knowledge of about science and computers.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Harlow, 2003
1. The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
2. The branch of knowledge concerned with applied sciences.
Compact Oxford Dictionary Online, Oxford, 2004

These entries cover just over fifty years, and reveal a gradual change in meaning. The idea of arts drops out, while science is amplified to include science and computers. The Longman entry reflects the influence, perhaps, of the more specialized information technology. In this way, since the noun describes technology in practical use, its meaning now covers new or emerging kinds of technology. As a noun, therefore, technology does not denote a single, unchanging and specific thing. It denotes, rather, a very general category of things - which includes a very wide range of other things, some of which change over time.

What remains constant is the idea that technology applies knowledge to achieve practical purposes. As regards language, while all technology has a connection to language use, this connection is arguably more explicit or obvious in the case of information technology. Here are two recent example dictionary entries for information technology:

The study or use of electronic processes for gathering and storing information and making it available using computers.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Harlow, 2003
The use of computers and other electronic equipment to store and send information
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, 2002

What does it have to do with language?

All technology influences language, in ways that are not always obvious. The development of transport systems, for example, leads people to move around so that language forms used in regional varieties may move into other regions. We use a metaphor such as "all guns blazing" to suggest the idea of an action performed with energy or aggression - so the technology of weapons extends the usage of everyday speech or writing.

Since technology is a means to extend man's reach, then it is necessarily connected to language, in the sense that both natural languages and technologies will be important in enabling us to do all sorts of things in almost any area of human activity. For example, we use aeroplanes to fly people and goods around the world. And we try to make this safer and more efficient by developing an air-traffic control system. That's language and technology working together for the common good. (And English is the language used in that system globally.)

This uses one kind of technology (radio communication) to support use of language in conversations in an adapted form of international English, that pass on information derived from other technologies (radar, weather-forecasting systems), to the users of yet another set of technologies (the pilots of aircraft).

This may help us to distinguish between the technology in itself, and the things we do with it, from a linguistic perspective. In terms of modelling our ideas about technology and language, we may think

  • first of the different technologies (printing, telephony, radio and TV, e-mail and so on)
  • and only then about what we do with them.

Alternatively, we may think first of the kind of language interactions we make, and then of the technologies that enable this. In this kind of model, we might usefully think of

  • levels of openness and privacy - is the language used in a public or restricted context?
  • ownership of the communications - does an interaction or any of its results belong to anyone and if so, in what way?
  • topology - are these one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many interactions, or something else?

We may then find that particular technologies are designed for, and well suited to, some of these kinds of language use. And we may be less likely to make dismissive claims such as that the Internet is CB (citizen band) radio for the 1990s (as many cynical people once said).

We will certainly find that the designers of the technology do not always anticipate the new kinds of language activity that will come from the ways that people use and adapt it. Think, for instance, of gramophone recording (a late 19th century technology) and text-messaging from and to mobile telephones (a late 20th century invention). Both of these developed in ways that their inventors did not foresee, but which we can now explain readily after having seen it happen.

  • The first gramophone or phonograph recordings were made to capture the spoken voice. Yet in time, this technology would emerge as especially well suited to recording musical performances for later playback. (We might add that Edison's idea for recording sound gained massively when it was used in conjunction with Marconi's idea of radio broadcasting: the sound recordings made music affordable to a wide audience, but the playing of recordings on radio gave the music a reach that is almost ubiquitous.)
  • Text messaging is an adaptation of the idea of mobile phone designers to use a simple text display to give the user information about the functions of the handset. Since this information was being displayed on a phone, it soon became apparent that one could use it for entering free text, that the user could transmit, by using the same underlying technology as the voice calls - and that these packets of information would be far smaller, and less costly to transmit. What the service providers could anticipate generally (but almost certainly without foreseeing the scale of its later popularity) was that users would like to be able to do this. (The assumption was more that we would use the technology for broadcast messages, such as weather or traffic information, than for personal interactions.)
Does technology make a difference to language use?

Storing and transmitting information | Electronic text and digitized information | Instant communication across geographical space | Linking to other electronic texts and processes | Automatic recording of computer activity | Echoing previous genres and technologies | Challenging notions of fixity and authority | How technology influences new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols

In studying language and technology, you will look at how the technology influences the language use, but you should not assume that the use of technology to mediate the language necessarily changes everything.

All kinds of circumstances can affect the way we use language. Using technology may do this - as we may note from the way that some speakers react to a journalist's microphone, or an invitation to leave a message on a telephone answering machine. But we should not suppose that, in the absence of such obvious technology, people speak in a neutral and "natural" way. Whereas in the past, some kinds of formal or rhetorical speaking were regarded as meritorious, and social conversation less well regarded, so now we can make the opposite mistake, and assume that spontaneous speaking of an unstructured kind, using many non-standard terms and constructions, is somehow more natural or authentic (and worthy of study) than more controlled or self-conscious utterance, using standard forms.

Technology can allow us to eavesdrop on conversations legitimately, as when we listen to a radio or TV broadcast. It also allows us to read texts from a greater range of writers - where traditional publishing is more selective and exclusive. And it allows us to read writing that has not been regulated and corrected by editors to conform to standard orthography or house style.

As with traditional publishing, where we do not know how many people have revised or edited the text that we eventually read, so also we cannot always know the process that has produced a text that we read or hear through a technological medium. We listen to a studio discussion on a radio broadcast, and picture the guests together - but do not realize that two of them are with the presenter in London, while a third is in a studio somewhere else. We listen to a conversation in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and do not know how the effects of editing - of selection and omission - have changed it.

Tim Shortis (Shortis, T., 2000, The Language of ICT, London, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-22275-3) suggests that the distinctive features of electronic text are that it:

  • Enables storage and transmission of diverse information.
  • Includes electronic typed text and/or digitised information.
  • Allows instant communication across geographical space.
  • Can be linked to other electronic texts and processes.
  • Keeps a record of its "history" automatically.
  • Echoes previous genres and technologies.
  • Challenges notions of fixity and authority.
  • Is conducive to new patterns of spelling and punctuation, and use of symbols.

Let's elaborate each of these suggestions.

Storing and transmitting information

It is easy to show objectively how technology has made it easier to store and transmit information - simply observing the number of documents generally, or of a specific type (say Web logs) on the World Wide Web demonstrates this. Likewise, it is an objective fact that a technology such as e-mail allows the instantaneous transmission of a large text document, with other kinds of data file attached to it, between any computers in the world that are connected to the Internet. And it is also an objective fact that the number of computers connected to the Internet (either occasionally or permanently) is also increasing.

You can easily demonstrate this by conducting searches of the World Wide Web. In a split second, you will turn up thousands, maybe millions, of documents in which the search item occurs. I asked Google ( ) to search for "cat" - in 0.07 seconds it found 155 million documents in which this text string occurs. "Coffee" yields 52 million documents in 0.17 seconds. But one could never look at more than a tiny proportion of them all.

Thus, the sheer volume of activity also challenges the user. In the Renaissance, it was possible for an educated person to know the titles and authors of most printed books in a given language, and perhaps to have read a sizeable proportion of them. The Bodleian Library in Oxford could aspire, through an agreement of 1610, to own a copy of every book published by the Stationers' Company - and for a while the librarians could still have an understanding of the complete contents of their shelves. But now, as a copyright library in the 21st century, the Bodleian receives some 1,500 volumes a week (75,000 a year). No individual can have more than an outline understanding of all of the extant printed texts. For every book that we know (a large number, perhaps) there are many thousands or more of lost, forgotten, hidden and unknown volumes.

What is true of the production of print texts is equally true of digital texts - in trying to form a sense of the totality of such data, we can only make the most rudimentary and heavily qualified statements.

Nor does the technology that keeps it extant temporarily, provide it with a permanent home: like the private letters and documents of individuals in past times, it is distributed among millions of digital storage devices. The very thing that enables us to store so much, and share it so swiftly, also makes these texts vulnerable to loss. An old book may survive for centuries but electronic storage is not so enduring. Indeed, digital publishing may have more in common with book production by manuscript in the ancient world - here texts were kept alive by a continual process of copying and distribution, replacing the old as they wore out, which for us may resemble the process of adapting information from one format or storage medium to a successor.

Electronic text and digitized information

Tim Shortis lists these together, but the first is of course only one of many examples of the second. In every case "digitized" information is really a series of 1s and 0s in the binary machine code that enables a computer or other device to represent the information in some other format, so that humans can experience it - such as an image (still or moving), a high-fidelity audio track or a text document that we can read, write or edit within the interface of a word processor, text editor or instant messenger.

The technologist has found many ways to do more things because digital information can be used across a wider range of devices that are inexpensive to manufacture. (At an even more highly technical level, this is because these devices use principles of solid-state physics, so there are no moving parts.) Some of the most popular applications of digitized information are very closely modelled on analogue technologies - such as voice telephony, and TV and radio broadcasting (indeed the broadcasting bit of the process is not changed; the difference lies in the nature of what is broadcast - so now the same ultra-high frequency and very-high frequency radio waves carry signals that are decoded as digital information by the receiving device). Recording to CD, DVD, mp3 players and hard drives also mimics recording to audio and videotape.