Recently read (or better ‘read thru’) David Crystal’s Language and the Internet (originally 2001, updated second version 2006). I’d never picked that one up. It is a good overview of the various aspects of online language use, from creative spellings in chatrooms, via the writing style of bloggers up to influence of spellcheckers, search engines and the language problems surrounding the Semantic Web. It is a survey of the Internet from a linguistic perspective. I find myself generally agreeing with all his points — I take a positive approach to language online as Crystal does.

He writes:

“I do not see the Internet being the death of languages, but the reverse. I view each of the Netspeak situations as an area of huge potential enrichment for individual languages.” p. 275

And his final sentence:

“The arrival of Netspeak is showing us homo loquens at its best.” p. 276

So hmm, I do not have a lot to say about this book. (Except that I find the term Netspeak extremely ugly.) Also because I am more interested in writing style, literature, media theory, and less in language use in e-mail, chats, sms-dialogues and programming.

So I cut-n-paste together just one passage about the importance of blogging. Crystal gives two examples of blogging and describes the spontaneous writing style of a blog post, he writes:

“Here we have examples of a style of writing which has never been seen in public, printed form, outside of literature, and even there it would take an ingenious novelist indeed to capture its innocent spontaneity and unpredictable thematic direction. It is difficult to know how to describe the style, because it falls uneasily between standard and non-standard English. Both extracts illustrate writing which is largely orthodox with respect to the main dimensions that identify standardness — spelling, punctuation, and grammar, but they depart from the norms in various ways. (…) There are several feattures of informal written English which would be eliminated in a copy-edited version of such texts for publication. (…) Before the emergence of standard English, of course, such a style would not have attracted any notice at all. (…) It is a style which was once the norm, for all kinds of writing, but which gradually went out of public use once the standard language was institutionalized in manuals of grammar, punctuation and usage, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was finally eliminated when publishers developed copy-editing procedures to ensure that their newspapers, magazines, and books conformed to an in-house style. After that point it was virtually impossible to see anything in print which had not been through a standardizing process. (…) And this is why blogging is so significant. Only here do we have the opportunity to see written discourse of sometimes substantial lenght which have had no such editorial interference. It is written language in its most naked form.” p. 244/245

Crystal, David, 2006. Language and the Internet, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

(This actually begs the question of how different bloggers deal with copy-editing individually. Some do copy-edit (especially the professional journalists), others write-as-if-they-speak and just leave the inconsistencies and errors. I’d say the level of editorial reflectiveness (is this a clear term?) differs enormously. Yet anyone writing will develop some sort of editorial relfectiveness in the long run. If only of the sort where it becomes the conscious decision to leave errors as they are.)

Booklet full of aphorisms. Oh-so quotable. I find myself wanting to use these quotes again and again. They are attractive. The attractiveness should not blind us. It will not, after so many years, I guess. The quotes are good to make a seminar or class attractive. Still. Together with the images.

So here, for future use. A digest.

“The medium or process of our time — electrical technology — is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing — you, your family, your neighborhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to “the others”. And they are changing dramatically.” p. 8

“Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know. The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions — the patterns of mechanistic technologies — are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank — that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.”” p. 12

(This bit is followed by: “We have already reached a point where remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effect on all of us, must be exerted.”)

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.” p. 26

“The dominant organ of sensory and social orientation in pre-alphabet societies was the ear — “hearing was believing.” The phonetic alphabet forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye. man was given an eye for an ear.” p. 44

“Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet, a medium that depends solely on the eye for comprehension. The alphabet is a construct of fragmented bits and parts which have no semantic meaning in themselves, and which must be strung together in a line, bead-like, and in a prescribed order. Its use fostered and encouraged the habit of perceiving all environments in visual and spatial terms — particular in terms of a space and of a time that are uniform, c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.” p. 44

“Printing, a ditto device (…) created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others. Man could now inspire — and conspire.” p. 50

“(T)he printed book added much to the new cult of individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy conferred the power of detachement, non-involvement.” p. 50

“Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. “Time” has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic space . We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of litercy divorced us.” p. 63

“Electric circuity profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.” p. 63

“Print technology created the public. Electric technology created the mass. The public consists of seperate individuals walking around with separate points of view. The new technology demands that we abandon the luxury of this posture, this fragmentary outlook.” p. 68/69

“The invention of printing did away with anonimity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habt of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public — a reading public. The rising consumer-orientied culture became concerned with labels od authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright — “the exclusive right to reproduce, publish and sell the matter and form of a literary or artistic work” — was born.” p. 122

From: McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin, The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects, Corte Madera, CA : Gingko Press, 2001 (1967).

The long expected end of old-fashioned television, television watched on a television monitor, has arrived in my house. Two days ago the receiver for digital television broke. Probably it’s still under guarantee, but it was reason enough to end the subscription to Digitenne.

I took the subscription only to watch the cycling on Belgian television. But even for that it is not worthwhile anymore. To be honest, I simply hardly ever had or took the time to relax and watch a full race. How much I enjoyed Robert Gesink riding in the Deutschlandtour (2007), Paris-Nice, the Dauphine and the Vuelta! yes I did, but what I saw where snippets, bits and pieces, fastforwarding the videotape.

The rest of the channels mostly bring rubbish. What’s worthwhile to watch I can see online. There are no public English, French or German channels in the Digitenne-subscription.

I will go for another experiment: getting my dose of watching cyclingraces through the internet. I go for the clips at Studio Sport, for the bits and pieces uploaded on Youtube, I hope to find torrents with full races (tips anyone?), and maybe even pay for some at cycling.tv.

Hey, and I’ll watch them on the Eee Pecee.

Net uitgelezen: Dirk van Hulle’s De Kladbewaarders. Prachtboek over tekstgenese – het ontstaan van literaire teksten, gereconstrueerd vanuit onderzoek van manuscripten, drukgeschiedenis et cetera. Niet alleen een uitstekende inleiding op tekstgenetica en een duidelijke positionering van dit type onderzoek, maar ook nog eens een stel essays die vanuit zulk onderzoek iets zinnigs melden over de literaire teksten in kwestie, en die je meteen doen verlangen zelf de besproken teksten (weer) ter hand te nemen en onmiddellijk te (her)lezen: Finnegans Wake en Ulysses natuurlijk, maar ook ‘alles’ van Beckett, Proust’s Recherche, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

Ah, gewoon een superboek!

(… dit is een blog, geen recensierubriek).

Bestel hier: http://www.vantilt.nl/detboek.aspx?Boek_ID=150.

Catching a tiny bit of the ATACD-seminars at V2_: http://www.atacd.net/. ANT, mapping and representations of data. For an idea of what this is about: http://www.demoscience.org/.

Just ordered George Lewis’ history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself
The AACM and American Experimental Music. Seems to be out, though Amazon still lists it as ‘not yet published’. I have been listening a lot to music from that scene the past year, so I’m craving for some ‘deeper’ information. Also curious what George Lewis has to say. The very first concert of free improv music that I witnessed was George Lewis + Gerry Hemingway and I love his sound on the trombone. Though I am sometimes put off by his writings, he can be heavy-handed (?) when he does theory. Here’s an excerpt: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/476957.html

Since a few months I work on the Macbook. Ever since I have at least wondered once a day how the design-team of this computer could’ve come up with the idea of the glossy mirror-screen AND implement it. One user-test in a real world situation would’ve shown that it has severe shortcomings. Whenever I write, I look at myself thinking through the the screen that carries the words I am typing. Who wants to look in the mirror all the time while writing, working, looking at webpages?

Or is this supposed to hail a new era of continuous self-consciousness?

My first German-language publication will soon be available. It’s a text on locative art and the work of Esther Polak in McLuhan Neu Lesen edited by Martina Leeker, Kerstin Schmidt and Derrick de Kerckhove: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts762/ts762.htm.

By now halfway the third day of Sonic Acts XII, if you can’t be (t)here, follow the livestreams and the blogs of our team of bloggers: http://www.sonicacts.com/wordpress/?cat=184/.

One of the reasons for not blogging too much is that I’ve been working on Sonic Acts XII The Cinematic Experience. The festival takes place from 21 – 24 February. Most of my time went into editing the book. Yesterday the book was delivered at the Sonic Acts office – I have not even seen it myself (will pick up a copy later today).

The book will be available during the festival, and can also already be ordered online at: http://www.sim-central.nl/detail.php?id=5757.

More info on the book and the festival at the Sonic Acts XII site: http://www.sonicacts.com/.