In Terms Of

Tag: Sociology

  • Words Got Pwned

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Jannis Androutsopoulos: Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change
    Wednesday, October 14, 2015
    Goethe-Institute, New York

    Texting is ruining language, right? People who use LOL, cul8r, and brb have lost the ability to write formally and coherently, if they ever learned at all. Writing skills are deteriorating, and who else is to blame but the internet? What makes it all worse is that everyone is writing more today than twenty or thirty years ago, a time when civilized people sent letters instead of emails. Yet nothing about this moral panic is true—at least not yet—according to Jannis Androutsopoulos, a professor of German and media linguistics at the University of Hamburg, who gave a talk on “Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change” at the New York branch of the Goethe-Institute. Nevertheless, and with a twinkle in his voice, he said, “something called the media has some mysterious effect on something called the language.”

    While some folks perceive how Millennials communicate—through indecipherable internet-informed language and those silly emojis—as a decline that “threatens us as a national community,” Androutsopoulos told us that people have been alarmed over the state of language and communication for some time, noting that a 1991 study by Sigurd Wichter predicted our situation today. Technological determinism such as autocomplete may force people to use language in certain ways, but what is the long-lasting impact? Because the internet is still relatively new, Androutsopoulos said, linguists cannot agree if “fuzzy and indeterminate” shifts in communication will turn out to be systemic changes. Thus blanket statements like those above cannot be validated by social science. To present his arguments, he introduced two current schools of thought: “system and features” and “repertoires and practices.”

    Jannis Androutsopoulos translates textese into English (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    System and Features

    Androutsopoulos identified four critical elements of networked writing:

      • technology mediation (keyboards and screens)
      • dialogic (interpersonal exchange, like status updates on Facebook, where you expect someone to respond)
      • vernacular (outside professional institutions)
      • unplanned and transient (unedited, ephemeral)

    The spelling of words is shortened to simplify a message, and in German the nominatives are not capitalized; homophones such as gr8 and cu are shortened with no change in pronunciation. These changes, Androutsopoulos revealed, existed before the internet and gravitated online. Look at any high school yearbook from the 1980s and 1990s and you’ll see net neologisms handwritten all over (KIT = keep in touch). Networked writing is also marked with an informal, spoken style (hafta); using all caps identifies tone (typically a shouting one); and the appearance of multiple letters (hiiiiiiiiii) indicates prosody, which means how quickly or slowly something is said. Punctuation such as ellipses takes on multiple meanings depending on where they’re used in a piece of internet writing, and what he called the inflective alludes to bodily movements that express emotion (*doing my happy dance*). The professor’s basic descriptions of “textese” were familiar, if not banal, but they indicate how academics approach the subject.

    “When do words exist?” Androutsopoulos asked. “When they are in the dictionary or when people start using them?” Linguists are interested in how new words—and new meanings for old words—enter the larger lexical sphere. Some oldies in the digital realm are download, modem, cyber, web, e-anything, hashtag, tweet, and app. More recent examples are Facebook stalking, unfriend, defriend, selfie, and (in German) entfreunden. “English-language scholars are oblivious, in a sense,” Androutsopoulos remarked, “to many important things happening in other languages.” It’s true. I had no idea that people are having serious discussions about conjugating the verb “to Google” in German. Nor did I ever think about how English-centric such phrases as “because + [noun]” can’t be translated into German, or how German verbs are now dropping their Gs.

    How does one conjugate the verb for “having found something out by googling” in German? (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Repertoires and Practices

    It’s common sense that written language evolves, but only academic research can confirm what we suspect is true. The German language wasn’t standardized until the eighteenth century, Androutsopoulos said, but digital communication has begun to break down this homogenous and invariant expression. The need to keep records, transmit knowledge, and build lengthy, complete arguments still exists, but the importance of social interaction has returned through the written word, not speech. Sociological studies reveal that people develop competence in more than one way of writing, and that formal and digital language are mutually intelligible. Read through a lengthy Facebook thread or a newspaper’s comment section—both examples of what Androutsopoulos calls “unregulated writing in the public space”—and you’ll find people carrying on a coherent conversation despite flagrant mistakes in punctuation, grammar, and spelling by some, and perfect formal writing by others. As a linguist he doesn’t aim to establish a binary of right and wrong, but rather he wants to know why languages change.

    What is also interesting to linguists is how tone, gesture, facial expression, prosody, and contrast appear in networked writing. To indicate expressiveness, “you need to find out ways to write it without saying it,” Androutsopoulos said. When texting, people have replaced the sentence-ending period with one or more exclamation marks, not to project enthusiasm but to avoid conveying apathy. Changes manifest is other ways. For example, in German an email begins with a salutation and ends with a farewell, but the professor’s students sometimes use greetings normally reserved for friends, families, and lovers. While Androutsopoulos claimed that a person’s writing style fits the situation, that people know how to move between the formal and informal styles, I regularly witness senior-level colleagues neglect punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar all within a single two-sentence business email. But maybe that’s just carelessness, not the inability to distinguish between professional and personal contexts.

    They See Me Rollin’ They Hatin’

    Because Funny

    Androutsopoulos spent some time talking about memes and image macros, such as Scumbag Steve and Bad Luck Brian, whose templates for manufacturing he called egalitarian. His specialty seems to be They See Me Rollin’ memes, Bayeux Tapestry parodies with hip-hop lyrics, and Hamburg memes with city-specific humor. The professor strangley claimed that when memes circulate, there’s no original to reference and that it doesn’t matter, but the high level of research presented by Know Your Meme and other obsessives clearly indicates otherwise. A serious analysis of memes may be a valid academic subject, but often it feels like someone explaining a joke—the experience gets ruined.

    An audience member asked if differences between male and female internet writing exist. Androutsopoulos stated that girls and women write hiiiii and use smileys more than boys and men do, but it also depends if the female interlocutor is writing to a male or female. Other research, he said, shows that gender differences eventually neutralize, and that scholars try not to make essentialist definitions.

    Although the claim of texting having a negative impact on formal writing has been refuted, Androutsopoulos conceded that linguists need more research and data, more fine-grain contextualization that focuses on qualitative close readings alongside quantitative statistical analyses. There is evidence for fleeting innovations, he concluded, but “it is difficult to draw the lines between innovations and change.”

    In Terms Of count: 10 (including 1 on a PowerPoint slide)

  • The Social Network

    Connections Count: The Power of Social Capital
    Tuesday, March 11, 2014
    New York University, Deutsches Haus, New York, NY

    Mark Ebers explains a diagram of the Medici family’s social capital (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “It’s not what you know but who you know that counts” so goes the saying, which you’ve heard so many times that it’s basically become truth. But why? Among those who have investigated the issue—which sociologists call social capital—is Mark Ebers, a professor of business administration, corporate development, and organization at the University of Cologne. During a recent talk at New York University, he attempted to explain what social capital is, how it works, and what its effects are. Basically, Ebers stated, social capital is resources gained from networks—an incredibly vague, nebulous definition that begged for explanation.

    Ebers summarized several conclusions about social capital theorized since the early 1970s: who you know is categorized as strong and weak ties, and how you know them affects brokerage and closure. A strong tie would be a close family member or business partner; weak ties are composed of acquaintances and professional colleagues. The sociologist Mark Granovetter examined how social capital helped people find jobs, apartments, and instructors (such as a piano teacher). People with strong ties know the same things, Ebers said. Aficionados of medieval lutes will have read the same books. In contrast, weak ties have dissimilar interests. A musicologist conversing with a physicist can generate new knowledge—and possibly social capital—for each person. Through empirical evidence, Granovetter proved that weak ties are better for a job search; they also favorably influence salary and promotion. Getting $50,000 in funding for a start-up, Ebers said, typically originates in a strong tie.

    Brokerage, according to the sociologist and strategist Ronald S. Burt, describes negotiations between two separate networks. A broker, Ebers explained, helps to avoid redundancy, foster innovation, and serve as a gatekeeper. This is good, he continued, for an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs, who worked with diverse groups of people and drew upon distinct individual spheres of knowledge to realize his vision. Jobs was an interesting example: because although companies like Apple and Google benefit tremendously from collaboration and experimental production on the inside, its final products enforce an exclusive ecosystem that discourages the use of other kinds of hardware and software.

    The social scientist James Coleman, an early adopter of the term “social capital,” theorized closure and established the concepts of dense connections (in communities) and network closure (a situation in which everyone is inextricably connected). Drawing from an essay published in 1993, Ebers discussed how the strong and weak ties of Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici (1389–1464) served the Florentine banker well on September 26, 1433.1 On this day several families in the Italian peninsula with loose associations—the Strozzi and Albizzi among them—considered toppling the Medici-approved government in what could have been, Ebers proposed, the Tahir Square of its time. Because support for the coup was lazily organized, Cosimo was able to mobilize his own allies—which did not have ties with each other but only to the Medicis—and halt the rebellion. Ebers, though, is interested in business, not history. What happens when, for example, the Eindhoven-based Dutch corporation Philips transformed its closed research laboratory into an open campus in which a hundred other companies were invited to set up shop, with knowledge (and presumably profits) shared among everyone?

    Mark Eber works the crowd

    Ebers’s published research has explored how social capital transforms and exploits knowledge from within a company and how that same company acquires and assimilates knowledge from the outside. Studying the development of six biotech start-ups in Germany, he found that the less-successful companies had reached “relational and cognitive lock-in” because their founders—who were scientists—perceived themselves as scientists whose business plan called for funding for research with the goal of presenting papers in successively more prestigious academic conferences, achieving success in the wrong venue.2 “We have a great paper,” these scientists would say, but the venture capitalists supporting them responded with a colossal “So what?” The more successful firms, Ebers discovered, had avoided institutional inertia by establishing diverse relationships in scientific, political, financial, and administrative communities; they also better divided the labor within each company, with certain leaders taking on specializations in these areas. One founder of a successful biotech, Ebers said, had a father in finance who had supplied advice; connections were also made with regulators in government.

    An audience member asked if a certain type of product from, say, a pharmaceutical firm, would prefer development in a closed network. Apparently they do, but in a cannibalistic way. Ebers reported that Big Pharma has been buying smaller biotech firms and bringing them into the fold. Further, he said that two teams within the same company will sometimes be assigned an identical project so that two solutions are produced, the better of which may not have occurred if only one team had worked on that same project. Other times, he noted, such competition may lead to resentment.

    Ebers discussed other potential and actual clashes. The boards of German companies, he disclosed, have few women and few non-Germans, which would make one assume that cognitive lock-in based on sexism and xenophobia might lead to financial downfall. Yet the merger between the Japanese automobile manufacturer Daimler and its American competitor, Chrysler, faced setbacks because of cultural differences. Still, the smaller the points of view, Ebers advised, the bigger the differences. Are Czechs and Slovaks all that different? Most definitely yes, a Czech or Slovak would believe. So, too, would residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn argue that their cultures are worlds apart.

    From a certain perspective, Ebers’s conclusions seemed painfully obvious. Of course a company, biotech or otherwise, would not find success unless it diversified or segmented its approach. The scientists for whom research—and not a product—was a top priority were doomed to struggle. Likewise, a designer building a smartphone app would need to marketing and legal advice, unless he or she wanted to lose a patent or copyright. It would only be remarkable that Ebers had found evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the concept of social capital—like the notion of “collaboration” in the art world—is problematic because it cannot be quantified, only alluded to with anecdotal evidence. As the sociologist Ben Fine has written, “Almost any form of social interaction has the potential to be understood as social capital. As a positive resource, it is presumed to have the capacity to facilitate almost any outcome in any walk of life, and to be liquid or fluid across them to a greater or lesser extent. And it is equally adaptable across subject matter, disciplines, methods, and techniques, at least within the social sciences. In short, in principle, and to a large (if selective) degree in practice, social capital can be anything you like.”3

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 See John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May 1993): 1259–1319.

    2 For the complete report, see Indre Maurer and Mark Ebers, “Dynamics of Social Capital and Their Performance Implications: Lessons from Biotechnology Start-Ups,” Administrative Science Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 2006): 262–92.

    3 Ben Fine, “Social Capital,” Developments in Practice 17, no. 4–5 (August 2007): 567.

    Read

    Deutsches Haus, “Professor Mark Ebers,” Deutsches Haus: The Stories Inside, May 22, 2014.