*** From the Archives ***

This article is from April 17, 2000, and is no longer current.

Eye on the Web: What Happened to All the Words?

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Alright, I know the Web was never a bastion of classic literature. I mean, the first book to be available exclusively as a Web download was by Stephen King, after all. And the snappier examples of online writing, like the fruits of Salon.com and Feedmag.com, tend to be edgier, more cyber-aware fare. But this doesn’t change the fact that the Internet was built on words. Before Aunt Martha started posting pictures of her strawberry jam, she was posting recipes on listservs and newsgroups. And before we started to think about the Web as a replacement for television, we were thinking about it as a replacement for the magazine.
Indeed, back when those geeky scientists invented the Internet (or when Al Gore invented it, whichever happened first) it was as a medium for the written word, plus a data table or two. And now, like it or not, the way we write on the Internet — in email, on newsgroups, on Web sites — has changed the writing as we know it.
IMHO
First of all, we’ve got a new lexicon of keyboard-ready abbreviations and symbols. We can now express emotions, from flat-out happiness, to tongue-in-cheekiness, using parentheses and semicolons. And we have those acronyms that everyone is supposed to know, like BTW, and LOL (I still have to ask whenever I get an email with LOL in it). Chat rooms, where you have to type as quickly as possible to keep up with the breathless pace of it all, are breeding grounds for new, cryptic, abbreviations.
The instant nature of Internet-based communication has given rise to a whole new way of stringing together phrases that eschews traditional conventions like punctuation and capitalization in favor of shortened words and lowercase i’s. And this new way of giving and receiving information in short bursts has finally spilled over to the space outside of the Web, that arena technology buffs like to call real-world.
Take conventional print magazines, like Time and Newsweek, and even such old-world stalwarts as National Geographic. Once these magazines were the domain of the feature story and not much else; these days they are chock full of mini-stories, catering to the newly shortened attention spans of an audience who is used to downloading their words off the Internet.
Of course, the Web, near anarchy that it is, has given more people the chance to call themselves writers (myself included) than the realm of print ever did. Anyone and their cousin can put up a Web site, anyone can be "published." If you ask me, this is a good thing. Why not take some of the power away from the good-old-boy editorial network? Why not give everyone who will take it a chance to share their written creations with the world?
More bad than good
Unfortunately, not everyone is a good writer, as sites like www.opendiary.com and www.diaryproject.com, portray only too well, and the Web is full to brimming with mediocrity in every conceivable form. With this so-called Internet bubble economy we’ve found ourselves in, where VC-backed dot-com’s are willing to throw money at just about anyone, whether they can compose a sentence or not (and if you want to include me in this grouping, I won’t begrudge you the privilege), we are indeed seeing more bad writing on the Web than good.
Maybe that’s okay for right now. Maybe we all need to get our brains around this new medium before we can start to improve it. But I think it is crucial that we do look for ways to improve the way we write on the Web, that we do eventually turn the abbreviations and acronyms back into thoughtfully-produced sentences, that we find better ways of incorporating the fast pace of the Web into our written lexicon. The Web is giving us access to so much information, so many tools that can make us smarter, that it would be a shame if we let it make us dumber.

  • anonymous says:

    Andrea Dudrow’s article on writing on the web is exactly on target. It is terrifying to realize that thought is completely word-based. Any intelligence that we exhibit without the use of words is the result of mere conditioning and can reproduced with lab rats. Words are the necessary tools of thought and to pervert or simplify language too much is to gamble with the ability to reason with our minds. (Hmmm, maybe Al Gore did invent the internet and this is why. :-)

  • anonymous says:

    That was a great article and one that needs to be read by all. Your right, the web can make us all dummies if not used properly. Maybe some writing courses could be offered for people who want to enrich their writings.

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