The December issue of Business
Information Review should be available to download in a couple of
weeks, and hard copies will be posted shortly after. One of the highlights of
the journal is Martin White’s Perspectives column, which in the December
issue explores the theme of Language, communities and virtual working. This
raises a question about how technology changes language, and how that affects
business processes and our working lives.
One of the most prolific commentators on technological
changes to language is David
Crystal. Over a long and distinguished career as a linguist, Crystal has
written number of accessibly books about the changes to language that
technology brings about. These
include Language and the Internet (2001) and Txting:
The gr8 Deb8 (2008). Through
these works, Crystal attempt to counter widespread anxieties about the damage
to language done by the internet, video games, and mobile phones typified by Robert Winson’s book Bad
Ideas? (2010). You can get a
sense of Crystal’s arguments from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2XVdDSJHqY
Technology may not be destroying language, but it does
change language, and this does have profound consequences for the ways in which
we communicate in a business context. Over the past twenty years for example we
have seen a massive diversification of contexts within which writing is used –
emails, SMS, Twitters, virtual worlds, online gaming, blogs, wikis, and so on –
the list is almost endless. Each of these brings with it a series of social
conventions about the appropriate form language to use – the appropriate
linguistic register. We have also seen writing used in many contexts that would
previously have been reserved for the spoken word. How many of the emails we
receive every day would have been sorted with a phone call twenty years ago?
How much ambiguity arises out of the fact that writing now dominates business
and professional communication, and writing lacks the linguistic clues carries
by gesture, expression, and tone of voice of the written word?
One of the key skills that employers often state new career
entrants lack is writing and communications skills. However, my experience as
an educator has been that it is not skills in using language effectively that
many young people lack, but skills in understanding and adopting the
appropriate linguistic register. And this is understandable perhaps not only
because the conventions of communications have shifted to a more informal
register over time, but also because those conventions are more fluid as a
consequence of the diversification of communications channels. Everyone knows
how to open and sign-off a business letter, but practices in opening and
signing-off business emails vary wildly. There is little doubt that business
communication has become more informal over time, but that dividing line
between the appropriate use of more formal and more informal registers has in
many contexts become quite difficult to discern. As channels of communication
continue to grow more diverse the conventions will almost certainly become less
fixed, and the difficulties of adopting the appropriate register will
undoubtedly grow.
Luke Tredinnick
