Language and Technology

research source
Key points:

the examiners advise them to study: the variety of language forms insofar as they are affected by

• the technological medium used for communication (e.g. telephone, radio, television, computer);
• the social functions that such media perform in both interpersonal and mass communication;
• historical and contemporary changes, where appropriate.

In particular, the guidance says, candidates should examine

• everyday functions and activities in context
• discourse features.

The examiners suggest that candidates should consider:

• advantages, sometimes called affordances or potential capabilities, enabled by such technology;
• constraints, as in entering text on a phone or keyboard;
• how technologies such as text chat and answer phone messages show features of interaction more commonly associated with spoken conversation.
• A second caution stresses the need for balanced answers - general comment needs to be related to specific details in the texts, while attention to these specific details needs to be illuminated by reference to theory and general ideas about language that they exemplify or challenge.

"

The study or use of electronic processes for gathering and storing information and making it available using computers.
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Harlow, 2003

The use of computers and other electronic equipment to store and send information
Cambridge Learner's Dictionary, Cambridge, 2002 "
 

 Technology's link to language:
All technology influences language, in ways that are not always obvious. The development of transport systems, for example, leads people to move around so that language forms used in regional varieties may move into other regions. We use a metaphor such as "all guns blazing" to suggest the idea of an action performed with energy or aggression - so the technology of weapons extends the usage of everyday speech or writing.

Since technology is a means to extend man's reach, then it is necessarily connected to language, in the sense that both natural languages and technologies will be important in enabling us to do all sorts of things in almost any area of human activity. For example, we use aeroplanes to fly people and goods around the world. And we try to make this safer and more efficient by developing an air-traffic control system. That's language and technology working together for the common good. (And English is the language used in that system globally.)


Technology in use:
This uses one kind of technology (radio communication) to support use of language in conversations in an adapted form of international English, that pass on information derived from other technologies (radar, weather-forecasting systems), to the users of yet another set of technologies (the pilots of aircraft).

This may help us to distinguish between the technology in itself, and the things we do with it, from a linguistic perspective. In terms of modelling our ideas about technology and language, we may think

• first of the different technologies (printing, telephony, radio and TV, e-mail and so on)
• and only then about what we do with them.

Alternatively, we may think first of the kind of language interactions we make, and then of the technologies that enable this. In this kind of model, we might usefully think of

• levels of openness and privacy - is the language used in a public or restricted context?
• ownership of the communications - does an interaction or any of its results belong to anyone and if so, in what way?
• topology - are these one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, many-to-many interactions, or something else?