Lakhasly

in texting. These public discourses, or moral panics, that are largely rein-
forced by mass media are centred on how the language adopted by young
people in their online communication may negatively affect their literacy
skills. Claims are made about how people are reading fewer books or have
lower reading abilities and concentration skills because of increasing use of
new media (e.g. Carr 2010). Labels have been given to what may seem to be
a genre of texting language such as ‘textese’ and ‘textspeak’. Indeed, such
techno-panics have existed for a long time throughout history when earlier
technologies such as radio, TV, and telegram writing style were invented, as
Crystal (2011) has pointed out. These claims tend to be unfounded opinions
based on brief observations and often contrast with scholarly research on
new media language discussed above. This has developed into growing
tension between academic and non-academic understandings of language
online.
Related to this is the problem of predictions about the influence of the
internet on language use. One prediction is that English will dominate the
internet. This might have been true for a short while in the 1990s but now
the internet and its users are becoming increasingly multilingual to the extent
that people who used to be labelled as monolinguals now inevitably engage
in certain kinds of translingual practices. (See Chapters 4 and 5.) Another
prediction is that ‘Netspeak’ features threaten standard English language.
However, as Crystal (2011) points out, only a small proportion of English
vocabulary has been modified for internet communication. Short forms
existed before the internet. Besides, the basic grammatical structure of the
language has not changed because of the internet. Academic studies have
begun to emerge as a reaction to these misconceptions. For example, Plester
and Wood’s (2009) research reveals a positive relationship between texting
and spelling abilities among British children.
LANGUAGE ONLINE AS TEXTS AND PRACTICES
The approach taken in this book is to combine the study of practices with
the analysis of texts in order to understand language online. Our particular
background and starting point is work in literacy studies investigating
language practices. The social practices which language is embedded in are
particularly salient when examining language online not least because of the
constant change, the constant learning and the fluidity of texts. A crucial part
of the context of texts online is locating them in the practices of their creation
and use. We move on to an overview of the approach of literacy studies as a
way into examining texts and practices online.
Literacy studiesis an area of research which has come into being in the
past 30 years. It is a ‘mid-level’ socio-cultural theory of reading and writing
that starts out from what people do with written language in their lives. It
examines in detail people’s broader social practices, noting that many of
these involve texts of some sort, and that we live in a textually mediated
social world (see Chapter 3), where texts are part of the fabric of social life. LANGUAGE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD
11 In this socio-cultural approach to written language, literacy is a social
activity and can best be described in terms of people’s literacy practices.
These practices are drawn upon in literacy events that are mediated by
written texts. The notion of literacy practicesis central to literacy studies.
There are common patterns in using reading and writing in a particular
situation where people bring their cultural knowledge to an activity.
The other key concept is literacy event. The notion of literacy event and
the methodologies of literacy studies have their roots in the sociolinguistic