If you had been living under a rock (or off the net) for the past 10 years, chances are my essay title would make no more sense than if it were written in Icelandic. Like it or not, Web lingo is a writing style in itself. Call this style what you want. I've come up with a few names myself: WEBonics, WEBenese, WEBlish, take your pick.
So far, the class has been discussing the change that the Web will surely bring to journalism; yet, we haven't really stopped to consider the repercussions on writing style in general. The question we must ask: Exactly how fast paced will we allow ourselves to be on the Web at the risk of transforming our writing structure?
As I often do when I have a moment of freedom or boredom, I signed into Hotmail this afternoon with the hope that maybe this time I'd get an actual email versus the typical "How to increase your..." junk emails. I was in luck! My friend from London had written me. I opened the email, only to be accosted with a sea of lower-case letters. My eyes squinted to read the message encoded among the "how r u" and the "miss chattin 2 u".
I began to wonder when it became acceptable to write so informally, even in email. Do people really not have the time to press the SHIFT key down while typing in a letter in order to capitalize letters? And are we really in such a hurry that we can't even manage to type a two-letter word such as "to" but rather substitute a number 2 instead? Even my computer can't recognize everything I'm writing. The spelling and grammar check is going nuts right now!
I think it is interesting that this form of writing is unique to the Web. Rarely do you hear people speak or write elsewhere in acronyms. I mean, when was the last time you heard someone telling you that your joke had him or her ROFL (Rolling On the Floor Laughing)? I began discussing it with Staci, and we were so interested in this language of the Web that we tried Googling for more terms (See, there are even new verbs because of the Web). Lo and behold, we turned up a website that was full of useful acronyms that make up Web Lingo or Web slang.
I'm convinced that all the benefits of the Web that we've discussed thus far contribute to this Web language. The new medium allows for this kind of freedom. However, I do think that simple style guidelines are important. For example, when writing for other media, we do in fact write in a slightly different style. For instance, in broadcast, we know better than to write 25%; it's actually 25 percent. Maybe when writing for the Web, we will have to follow slightly different rules as well. I think in the coming years, there also will be a style guide for the Web, just as there is for newspaper and broadcast.
To learn more about Web lingo, visit http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,88686,00.asp
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