the idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy or at least writingability among young people in the united states and now the whole world today the fact of the matter is that it just isn 't true
and it 's easy to think that it is true but in order to see it in another way in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing not just energetic but a miraculous thing a kind of emergent complexity
that we 're seeinghappening right now we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is
in which case one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all what do i mean by that
basically if we think about language language has existed for perhaps one hundred and fifty thousand years at least eighty thousand years and what it arose as is speech
people talked that 's what we 're probably genetically specified for that 's how we use language most writing is something that came along much later and as we saw in the last talk there 's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened but according to traditional estimates if
humanity had existed for twenty four hours then writing only came along at about eleven seven p m that 's how much of a latterly thing writing is
so first there 's speech and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice now don 't get me wrong writing has certain advantages when you write because it 's a conscious process because you can look backwards
you can do things with language that are much less likely if you 're just talking for example imagine a passage from edward gibbon 's the decline and fall of the roman empire
the whole engagement lasted above twelve hours till the graduate retreat of the persians was changed into a disorderly flight of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the surenas himself that 's beautiful but let 's face it nobody talks that way or
at least they shouldn 't if they 're interested in reproducing
is not the way any human being speaks casually casual speech is something quite different linguists have actually shown that when we 're speaking casually in an unmonitored way we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven
much looser it 's much more telegraphic it 's much less reflective very different from writing so we naturally tend to think because we see language written so often that that 's what language is but actually what language is is speech they are two things
now of course as history has gone by it 's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing so
for example in a distant
to basically talk like writing
so i mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat and they go ahem ladies and gentlemen and then they speak
in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech it 's formal it uses long sentences like this gibbon one it 's basically talking like you write and so for example we 're thinking so much these days about lincoln
because of the movie the gettysburg address was not the main meal of that event for two hours before that edward everett spoke on a topic that frankly cannot engage us today and barely did then
the point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours it was perfectly natural
that 's what people did then speaking like writing well if you can speak like writing then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write
like you speak the problem was just that in the material mechanical sense that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don 't lend themselves to it it 's almost impossible to do that with your hand except
in shorthand and then communication is limited on a manualtypewriter it was very difficult and even when we had electric typewriters or then computer keyboards
the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech more or less you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak
and that 's where texting comes in
and so texting is very loose in its structure no one thinks about capital letters or punctuation
when one texts but then again do you think about those things when you talk no and so therefore why would you when you were texting what texting is despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing is
fingered speech that 's what texting is now we can write the way we talk
and it 's a very interesting thing but nevertheless easy to think
that still it represents some sort of decline we see this general bagginess of the structure the lack of concern with rules and the way that we 're used to learning on the blackboard and so we think that something has gone wrong it 's a very natural sense
but the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity that 's what we 're seeing in this fingered speech
and in order to understand it what we want to see is the way in this new kind of language there is new structure coming up and so for example there is in texting a convention which is
or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it 's become you 'll notice that lol does not mean laughing out loud anymore it 's evolved into something that is much subtler
this is an actual text that was done by a non male person of about twenty years old not too long ago i love the font you 're using btw julie lol thanks gmail is being slow right now now if you think about it that 's not funny no one 's laughing
when you 're talking about these inconveniences so julie says i just sent you an email susan lol i see it very funny people if that 's what lol means
this julie says so what 's up susan lol i have to write a ten page paper she 's not amused let 's think about it
lol is being used in a very particular way it 's a marker of empathy it 's a marker of accommodation
we linguists call things like that pragmatic particles any spoken language that 's used by real people has them if you happen to speak japanese think about that little word ne that you use at the end of a lot of sentences if you listen to the way black youth today speak
think about the use of the word yo whole dissertations could be written about it and probably are being written about it a pragmatic particle that 's what lol has gradually become it 's a way of using the language between actual people another example is slash
now we can use slash in the way that we 're used to along the lines of we 're going to have a party slash networking session that 's kind of like what we 're at slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today it 's used to change the scene so for example
this sally person says so i need to find people to chill with and jake says haha you could write a dissertation about haha too but we don 't have time for that
or you 'll say something like hmm makes you think when it really didn 't but what you 're really
so we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing
everything somehow in terms of writing was
perfect because the people on downton abbey are articulate or something like that so from every college in the country goes up the cry our freshmen can 't spell can 't punctuate and so on you can go even further back than this it 's the president of harvard it 's one thousand eight hundred and seventy one there 's no electricity people have three names bad spelling
incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing and he 's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies you can go even further back
there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning and so
the way i 'm thinking of texting these days is
that what we 're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing which they 're using alongside their ordinary writing skills and that means
that they 're able to do two things increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial that 's also true of being bidialectal that 's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing and so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act
those people take those people and they read a very typical text written by a twenty year old today often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young
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