On social networks, language skills
“G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide” by Danah Boyd, PhD student at UC-Berkeley and a researcher at Yahoo! Research Berkeley.
Comparing and contrasting “CRAIGSLIST, FLICKR and MYSPACE,” Boyd writes:
These three sites have many attributes in common. They all grew organically. They each have public personalities that early adopters feel connected to. The early adopters really felt as though they were participating in and creating an intimate community, even as the community grew to millions. Users are passionate. Designers are passionate. They feel a responsibility to it and are deeply invested in making users happy. Character was not boiled out of the site; the text on the system is natural and goofy, reflecting the personality quirks of the developers rather than the formal speech of a corporation. Each site has a unique culture that was born early on and evolved through years of use and growth. The culture evolves with the designers and users working in tandem…
Even with the organic growth that made all three sites popular, there are now millions of users who are not invested in the culture that the creators nurtured. Site-wide cultural cohesion starts to disintegrate. Sub-cultures with conflicting values form within the site. Managing this is hard for both the users and the creators. Design decisions are made to stop certain behaviors, but they simultaneously limit the good things that others can do.
There is no way that the creators of these site can pay attention to everything that is going on. Even with huge support staff dedicated to eliminating the most destructive of behaviors, all sites suffer from porn, hate speech, and abusive users. This is particularly disheartening for the sites’ creators because they are really invested in their communities and it pains them to see people do harm within the cultures they’ve helped evolve. They are often frustrated with themselves, trying to understand what they can do to make things better…
As digital communities grow, they do not get homogeneous. In fact, quite the opposite. They get unwieldy as different communities within the system compete for resources where that resource is features that move the system in the direction they would like to see it go. Everyone is connected, meaning that all sorts of conflicts come crashing together. Language barriers make it hard for people to communicate. Cultural barriers make it hard for them to understand each other. Social barriers make them not care.
Boyd goes on to provide suggestions for how to grow social networks in the context of a global internet. It’s straightforward and a quick read.
But… then she does this:
- “PatTy D aka tHe ScO CitY 415 LiKe wHa!!!”
- “yung ant wassup wit it jus show’n da page sum luv so do da same a where u get dat background bru”
- “suP WIt IT pLAY bOI?”It’s easy to express horror and indignation at this writing style if you’re not a part of the relevant social group, but that is a condescending position. What these teens are doing with language is fascinating and important. They are repurposing written words to express culture in the same way that people have always repurposed spoken words for slang. Because teens spend more time online, they are morphing written words for expressive communication. They are personalizing words.
It’s easy to express delight and fascination at this writing style if you’re a PhD student who works for Yahoo! Research Berkeley.
Let’s look at some relevant stats, shall we?
According to the rosiest numbers, the number of American high school seniors with below basic writing achievement levels in the U.S. is 26% and growing.
From another institutional booster of U.S. education:
89 percent of sophomores had mastered the skills of simple reading comprehension (proficiency level 1); 46 percent were able to make relatively simple inferences beyond the author’s main thought (proficiency level 2); and 8 percent could make complex inferences (proficiency level 3).
Less than half — and possibly less than one in ten — are able to interpret the meaning of a statement. So much for “personalizing” language.
No matter.
There has always been and always will be slang — some of it clever, some of it not. But what makes this new vernacular significant isn’t some expressive movement but rather a much more mundane constraint: the keyboard.
Until a better interface is available for social networking, we’ll continue to c abbrev. in place of words.
There’s no reason to believe such shortcuts represent a significant cultural development just as there no reason to believe that the Cuban refugees who turn pickup trucks into boats are on the cutting edge of maritime vehicle design.
(via this related link from Waxy)