Book contents
8 - The linguistic future of the Internet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
It seems to be a standard convention for books dealing with digital technology to begin or end by warning their readers that everything they contain is going to be soon out of date; and a linguistic perspective on the subject is no exception. Any attempt to characterize the language of the Internet, whether as a whole or with reference to one of its constituent situations, immediately runs up against the transience of the technology. The different arenas of communication described in earlier chapters will not remain for long as they are, given that the technological developments upon which they rely are constantly evolving, putting users under constant pressure to adapt their language to the demands of new contexts, and giving them fresh opportunities to interact in novel ways. The readiness with which people do adapt language to meet the needs of new situations, which is at the heart of linguistic evolution – and which the central chapters of this book clearly demonstrate – is going to be fully exploited in the next few decades, with the emergence of yet more sophisticated forms of digitally mediated communication. Nor is the population using it any more stable: it is unusual to see a disclaimer in a bibliography of the kind used on p. 243, for example, but there is simply no guarantee that any of the URLs [uniform resource locators] listed in my footnotes and bibliography will still exist by the time this book appears. They may have become ‘dead links’ (p. 202).
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- Language and the Internet , pp. 224 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001