Language and Technology

In giving guidance to people studying the subject, 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.

The examiners advise teachers to use varied types of text in presenting the subject. These might, for example, include:

• transcripts and written records of actuality;
• accounts of popular attitudes in print media;
• examples of represented text (such as invented e-mail messages in fiction and advertising), and
• excerpts from any investigations, including those done by students.

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?