Slipping private boundaries: how the web is changing language

“What the internet has done is to create a space for language that runs and slips over the boundary of public and private language, and so people find themselves gradually using language in public in ways they never would have before.”

This quote from James O’Donnell, author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace, sums it up nicely. The web has blurred the boundaries between private and public, and consequently has affected the way we communicate online and offline. It’s a gripe many can identify with: “That awkward moment when someone refers to something on your social media profile IRL (in real life)”. Where is that line between private and public, and how has it affected our language?

Conversations with lovers and strangers

In actual fact, the very division between public and private often manifests itself through language. We use different tones of voice, different communication styles, and different vocabularies in intimate conversations with lovers, family and old friends than we do when addressing our managers or employees, or when speaking to strangers. Certain words are more acceptable in private, and we tend to be more formal in the public sphere. Overheard conversations can usually very quickly be identified as private or public, depending on these same factors.

Talking long term

In recent years, however, the intersection of public and private and the preference for a sense of one-on-one or personalised communication online has resulted in more informal language becoming the “appropriate” register for the web. Sentences are shorter, abbreviations and acronyms abound and grammar conventions are less rigid.

When “SMS speak” began to creep into essays and assignments in schools, there was a global outcry from the literate. It seemed nobody would ever learn how to use words properly again. However, we soon saw a backlash against this illegible and sacrilegious practice, and concerns have abated somewhat. But these web-related shifts in the way we communicate are more insidious, and likely more permanent.

Currently, online copywriting courses are popular, which in itself is an indication that there is a formalised distinction between how we write for the web and how we write for print. There certainly are best practices for writing for online media: concision is key for sentences and articles; dividing copy into shorter segments for scannability is preferable, and the tone is usually more relaxed. But is the way we read online influencing our capacity for reading offline? Is it not increasingly difficult to get stuck into George Eliot or Virginia Woolf as our attention span shortens and we struggle to concentrate on paragraphs longer than 10cm? In the age of information overload, we’re paradoxically reading more and less at the same time.

The verdict and the sentence

It’s not all doom and gloom: in fact, online writing conventions can be argued to have strong benefits. For one, the ability to be concise is a specific skill that some never master. Perhaps being forced to condense our thoughts is a positive outcome of the 140-character limit, and rather than breeding laziness or saving time, it in fact forces clarification. Yet perhaps this phenomenon is only something experienced by people who work nine-to-five office jobs and spend their days online, and perhaps many see novels and in-depth articles as a welcome escape from the plethora of 600-word opinion pieces.

At this point, who’s to say that there won’t be a backlash against the short-and-sweet? I’d hedge my bets though. There’s something pithy about good online copy that would be a shame to lose.