Back stage front stage

Today I enjoyed an interesting chat with Dr. Robert Nagy over lunch in Liberec, in the North of the Czech Republic. Robert is a lecturer both at the Technical University of Liberec and also at Charles University in Prague. He's a fellow psychologist, and we had a lot to chat about subsequent to him sitting in on one of my sessions this morning.

I was discussing one of my favourite theories with the group - Erving Goffman's Drama model of social interaction. Goffman suggests that each of us attempts to 'manage our impression' before our 'audience' as if we were performing on a stage. Front stage representation draws upon scripts, costumes, roles and props, as each person tries to present themselves in their most favourable manner. Back stage is different - this is the region where we are at our most informal, and where we let our guard down. I was applying Goffman's theory to online spaces such as social networks. I asked the group how many of them had a Facebook account. Of course, as I expected, everyone did. Next we discussed how people represent themselves on Facebook through their profiles, pictures, games they play, groups they join, and people they 'friend' online. Part of the downside of Facebook, I reminded them, is when you (or someone else) posts images of yourself onto the site. It's difficult to remove them once they are posted, and if they are tagged, it is easy to find them. Most people don't mind this, we agreed, but if an image is inappropriate (falling out of a pub at 3 am, the worse for wear), this may work against you when you apply for a job and your prospective employer decides to check you out on Facebook.

The problem, I theorised, is that many Facebook users perceive the social network as a 'back stage' area where they can let their hair down a little, remove their mask, relax and banter with their friends, and generally say what they want to. The mistake of course, is that Facebook is quite public (depending on how you manage your privacy controls) and open to many people to view. In reality it is a front stage region, yet with your guard down, you are likely to make a public fool of yourself if you are not careful and think you are bacjstage. The rules of social interaction, I suggested, are changing.

Afterwards, over lunch, Robert expressed doubt that the rules are actually changing. His argument is that most social conventions are usually quite rigid and that bad or good behaviour is the same, whatever platform, real or virtual, it is acted out upon. To an extent I agreed, but I pointed out that some conventions are in fact changing because of new affordances being introduced by technology. What is considered rude or aggressive by one person may not be seen as such by another. An innocent text message sent by one person may be construed by its recipient to be offensive or threatening. This may be due to a reduction in social cues, or simply not enough supplementary information being embedded within the text. Failure to include emoticons, or other 'non-textual' communication may render the message void of emotion, and then readers are left up to their own devices to decide whether the message is in fact ironic, or sent with some malice. Lack of experience in an online environment may lead the recipient to take the least form of resistance and miscontrue the message.

For me, the rules of engagement are changing to adapt to the technology that is increasingly mediating our conversations. The reduced or 'squeezed' text that is redolent of short message services such as mobile texting has spawned a new style of communication. If you are on the inside you will ROFL when you read the message. If you are on the outside, and not used to this style of communication, you may very well take offense or miss the point. So are the rules of social interaction changing, or are they the same as they ever were, just dressed up in a different form?

Image source by Slimmer_Jimmer


Back stage front stage by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Txt in line

Later today I'm travelling up to the University of Bath to meet up this evening with some of the other speakers at the 6th 'Let's Talk About Text' conference. The event takes place tomorrow, Wednesday 19th May, and I'm presenting the opening keynote speech. I'm actually a little regretful of the fact that once lunchtime comes around, I'm going to have to jump into my car and head over to Bristol Airport to catch a flight to Germany where I will be working on Thursday and Friday (More about that later in the week). But for the short time I'm in Bath, I hope to catch up with a number of old friends such as Andy Black, Nitin Parmar, Matt Lingard and Andy Ramsden.

My presentation, which I have embedded here, will hopefully set the scene for what I am sure will be another great event in the series organised by Txttools Ltd. Stephen McCann, Steve Sidaway and their team have put together an interesting programme which I;m sure the 50 or so delegates will find thoroughly engaging. My keynote will cover a range of issues around the use of SMS in education, including a brief history of human communication, from cave paintings to mobile phone texting, student expectations, cultural shifts, language change including 'squeezetext', the texture of language, and finally ... what the research has already shown us about the use of txt in higher education, good and bad. If you're at the conference on Wednesday, I'll see you there.

Everything you always wanted to know about text

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

'Txt in line' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Scotching the myth

Just about every new technology that has been introduced has been criticised for its potential to corrupt, dumb-down or otherwise undermine society. A recent speech by the Open University's Martin Bean highlighted the fact that from the slateboard to the Internet, the doomsayers have been warning us that we are at risk and that innovation is to be feared and new technologies avoided.

Reading the recent interview of the celebrated language scholar David Crystal reveals that there is a tension between the expectations people place on the use of new technologies and their actual use. Crystal dashes the myth that young people's literacy skills (and in particular their ability to spell correctly) are being weakened by texting through SMS on mobile phones. It is true, he says, that there is some abbreviation used in texting, twittering and other forms of messaging where space is limited (in his new book entitled the Gr8 Deb8 he acknowledges this phenomenon). But this type of txting, he argues, is a pragmatic and context specific ploy rather than a sea-change in the way people are writing. He goes on to expose the hoax essay in which a student was purported to have written a holiday account completely in txt-speak. 'Squeeze text' has its place, is the message, but it won't damage our ability to communicate in more traditional ways. We have always had abbreviated versions of text says Crystal:

"And so the point to make to adults who are criticizing the situation is to say, "You actually did precisely the same thing when you were a kid, except of course you didn't have a mobile phone to do it on." There's the old example, "YY UR YY UB IC UR YY 4ME" ["Too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me"]. As soon as you mention it, adults will say, "Oh yes, of course," and it gives them a bit of a shock to realize that in fact most of the abbreviations aren't new at all."

Alistair Creelman's summary of the interview is particularly useful:

"Teenagers, argues Crystal, are able to cope easily with different registers of language and realize clearly when texting language is appropriate. Interviews with many teenagers reveal that they can't believe how anyone would use texting abbreviations in school work. It simply doesn't belong there and they all realise that. In addition, by analysing large amounts of text messages Crystal found that only around 10% of words were abbreviated at all, thereby deflating the whole debate."

According to Crystal, txting is not going to end the world as we know it, and the tower of literacy is not going to come crashing down around our ears. My view is that children use new technologies to find new ways to communicate. They don't lose the ability to communicate in more traditional ways. They simply find new ways, and in effect, some are actually more adept at communicating than their parents, because they have so many more channels at their disposal. So teachers and parents can now rest easy and worry about other things. Now all we have to do is stamp out the grocer's apostrophe...

Related posts:

Iz txting uhfecting r students? (Writaholics Anonymous)

Image source (edited)

Always connected

This is a continuation of yesterday's post entitled: The digital tribe and the network nation.

It was Howard Rheingold (2002) who coined the term ‘smart mobs’ (a play on the word 'mobile' or mobile phone) to describe individuals who work collectively and intelligently toward a mutual goal without necessarily having met. Unlike their more feral counterparts, smart mobs tend to act intelligently and with a purpose. They are distributed beings (Curtis, 2004), carrying devices that have immense computing power and telecommunication capability, enabling them to collaborate in ways which were previously inconceivable. The immediacy of their communicative ability and the ubiquity and persistence of their engagement (they are always connected) within the smart mob enable them to perform collective feats of imagination, co-operation, trading and the exploitation of aggregative mind power, beyond anything humankind has ever achieved up to this point in its history. This may appear to read as a eulogy, but in reality smart mobs are the vanguard of an influential social movement that will gather pace over the next few years and will ultimately radically change the face of education.

Smart mobs can act for the public good, for example where drivers use their mobile phones to inform a local radio station of a road traffic accident. They can also act concertedly for more nefarious purposes, such as tram or bus passengers who text their ticketless friends to warn them of the location of ticket inspectors. Some smart mob activities may be pointless to all but those who participate in the action. In recent years, a new social phenomenon has been observed, particularly in urban areas. Known as ‘flash mobs’, they are large groups of people who suddenly gather in a public place, perform some meaningless activity for a period of time, and then just as quickly disappear. The T-Mobile dance was an example of this phenomenon and there are many more examples. Flash mobs are almost always co-ordinated by one or more individuals through mass SMS texting, e-mails or other electronic message transmission methods. Technology directed flash mobs have occasionally gathered for political purposes at times of civil unrest in Romania and China, but generally their purpose is ill defined. Flash mobs have been explained as a classic example of the innate need for people to belong to a group, be privy to inside knowledge, and be able to participate in what is ‘happening’.

Rheingold also identifies a ‘thumb tribe’ which consists predominantly of those younger members of society who appear to be constantly connected to the rest of their tribe and who use ‘one thumb signalling’ via text to communicate. They belong to the larger tribe of the ‘always connected’ who are identifiable by their apparent dependency on mobile telecommunication technologies. They are clearly identified not only by the means through which they communicate, but also by the manner in which this communication is constructed, i.e their vocabulary. SMS text is constrained by a single message limit of 160 characters. To save money, txters have developed a reduced form of language made up of letters, numbers and symbols. Known as ‘squeeze text’ (Carrington, 2005) this clannish form of language changes the morphology of the language being used, with little or no loss of its semantics for those who are members of the clan. For those outside the clan however, txting can present a bewildering conundrum.

Tomorrow: Digital pervasion and loss of identity

References

Carrington, V. (2005) Txting: The end of civilisation (again?) Cambridge Journal of Education. 35 (2), 161-175.
Curtis, M. (2004) Distraction: Being human in a digital world. London: Futuretext.
Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

Image source

The end of civilization? Revoicing txt

I borrowed the title for this blog post from an article by an old friend and colleague of mine, Victoria Carrington, who is sadly no longer with us (she returned to Australia, see). Victoria introduced the term 'squeeze text' or 'txt' to describe the respellings that have emerged due to short message services where 160 characters or less prompt abbreviations and other contrivances. Words and phrases such as gr8, cu2moro and l8r, (a short glossary is available) have caused consternation amongst purists of grammar and spelling, hence the 'end of civilisation' imprecation. Such respellings may however be simply evidence of a continuing process of evolution for the English language. In the new volume 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', a chapter written by Tim Shortis explores this notion in greater detail. Tim considers the way texting is challenging the orthodoxy of spelling, and shows that there are...

...textual pressures that act on users' choices. ICT and the Internet have not so much changed spelling as reregulated what counts as spelling, and in doing so, there is a challenge to the official educational discourses of literacy, and particularly as they apply to literacy (p 225).

Tim is very vocal in his belief that text respelling is nothing new, although the technology being used to convey the messages is. The 'vernacular orthographies' - slang and reduced spellings used in txt messages - have influences, he says, which go beyond the limited 160 characters, embracing a number of other influences including trade names and popular culture. This is a well written and challenging chapter, and I suspect the purists amongst us who baulk against the idea of txters creating their own new spellings of words, will probably be in no position to complain in 30-40 years time when 'Generation Y' have become the captains of industry, head teachers and military commanders, and we have all joined the ranks of the retired.

(picture source: georgevanantwerp.com)