Question

In David Crystal's book "Language and the Internet" in chapter 4 (The language of e-mail) what is the main idea in this chapter?

Answer 1

David Crystal investigates the nature of the impact which the Internet is making on language. There is already a widespread popular mythology that the Internet is going to be bad for the future of language that technospeak will rule, standards be lost, and creativity diminished as globalization imposes sameness. The argument of this book is the reverse: that the Internet is in fact enabling a dramatic expansion to take place in the range and variety of language, and is providing unprecedented opportunities for personal creativity. The Internet has now been around long enough for us to ‘take a view’ about the way in which it is being shaped by and is shaping language and languages, and there is no one better placed than David Crystal to take that view. His book is written to be accessible to anyone who has used the Internet and who has an interest in language issues.

At one level, it is extremely easy to define the linguistic identity of e-mail as a variety of language at another level, it is surprisingly difficult. The easy part lies in the fixed discourse structure of the message a structure dictated by the mailer software which has become increasingly standardized over the past twenty years. Just in the same way as we can analyse the functionally distinct elements that constitute a newspaper article (in terms of headline, body copy, illustration, caption, etc.) or a scientific paper (in terms of title, authorship, abstract, introduction, methodology, etc.), so we can see in e-mails a fixed sequence of discourse elements. They will be so familiar to likely readers of this book that they need only the briefest of expositions. The difficult part, to which the bulk of this chapter relates, lies in the range of opinions about the purpose of e-mail, as a communicative medium, and about the kind of language which is the most appropriate and effective to achieve that purpose. With over 800 million people using e-mail by 2000,1 and 100 million or so being sent each day, a consensus seems unlikely, especially when age, sex, and cultural differences are taken into account. At the same time, it ought at least to be possible to identify what the parameters of disagreement are, to develop a sense of the range of linguistic features which any characterization of e-mail would have to include.