Practices of English Speakers - Essay Example

?To what extent have the literacy practices of English speakers been shaped by communication technology? The literacy practice that involves people interacting with written language has been under a great influence by communication technologies. Spoken language affects its listener by gestures and the tone of voice, the written language affects its reader with its linguistic and visual aspects. Literacy practices vary between different groups of people according to their priorities and life style and between cultures according to their norms and conventions. All the written languages come under a specific genre which undergoes a development according to the needs of the society while fulfilling conventions (Allington, and Hewings, 2012). In the start, the books were written for a specific class and were handwritten and expensive, therefore were only accessible to a specific class of readers. With the invention of printing machines and later digital communication technology made reading books more common. The production and reproduction of the physical form of text experienced a great deal of changes from its initial stage to the current form, resulting in gradual enhancement of the literacy practice. In the ancient world the words were inscribed in wax or clay tablets but now this carving technique is only used for decorative purposes. The alphabets taken from the Roman and Latin worlds did not allow much convenience with the pronunciation so they also went through change. The written language was more for the religious elite with no space among the words and an audible effort was made to apprehend the words. The Irish invention of word spacing and silent reading made it easy to be read and freed it from its conventional purposes (Allington, 2012). In the twelfth century the woodblock printing, which was originally invented in China, made the Europeans copy only the pictures on the page, later full text was also brought onto the page. The radical development came with the invention of hand press by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century which consisted of metal blocks containing letters on them, and in spite of it being very expensive it was used to fulfil the demand of books to the western society (Allington, 2012). This print culture was not cherished by all members of the society as the British politicians were afraid of mass literacy, before then the lower class had access only to chapbooks which contained outdated content. Church authorities attempted to deprive the common people of the literature. Newspapers were imposed with heavy tax by the British government to keep them out of the reach of the poor people with the Stamp Act of 1712. Despite all the hurdles put on mass literacy practice, English language was widely printed and literacy practice had increased enormously by the nineteenth century. It is stated (Eliot, 2007) that the literacy rate was 60 per cent in males and 45 per cent in females in 1800 which progressed to 94 per cent and 93 per cent by 1891. The printing press also went through rapid development in nineteenth century. The twentieth century brought more technological development as metal type printing vanished and photographic and chemical processing was established, this brought easy and fast reproduction of text in bulk setting up a wider range of readers by it being economical and accessible to all classes of the society. The industry of book production was in Edinburgh, Scotland in the seventeenth century and through printing English they managed to keep the English readers and readers from other colonies which maintained their British Empire. The less familiarity of the English language for Scottish people gave way to the publication of the first dictionary of the Scots and later with the political and national movements, the vernacular speeches and the ingenuity of writers made other languages to become print-language (Anderson, 2006, in Allington, 2012). The access to the books helped the writers from different regions to convey all the political, economic and national content to their readers. The libraries had a huge collection of a great variety of books from the whole world thus literacy practice made people aware of the knowledge of the world around. To keep the public unaware of the content that could enrage them, certain books were banned by the government, but the material available on internet is hard to keep under check as it was observed that the US remained unable to prevent the WikiLeaks website from revealing the confidential diplomatic content. So in the recent years the imperatives have taken measures to have a check on the content for their commercial interests. The literacy practice has gained enough strength even to get freedom to a country as we see in the case of the Republic of South Africa which was under the rule of white people in the Apartheid era and the nationalists ran the campaign of freedom through their writings, Rudi Ventner argues that Afrikaners got power not because of the establishment of their political party but because of the establishment of their language movements (Ventner, 2007, p.100 in Allington, 2012). To gain a worldwide audience they even wrote books in English and to prevent them from being banned they got their Afrikaans books published from those English printers who did not understand the language. Their English books moved privately from hand to hand or through unofficial ways as extracts or photocopies or even the original ones which Rachel Matteau names as an ‘underground communication system’ (Matteau, 2007, pp. 81, 84 in Allington, 2012). The ‘digital’ development in communication technology has brought a lasting and profound impact to not only the English speakers but also to the communication practice itself. Written language communicates through a wide range of ways using many means and all these digital means focus on technological determinism because of their affordances and accessibility. This determinism does not allow many of the essential features to get printed on page such as sound and video files, digital images, and makes the readers to rely mainly on the digital form. So ‘the age of print’ has been replaced by the ‘digital age’ since the start of twentieth century and the technological determinism has become successful in shaping the behaviour of the people by making them dependent on it for its affordance and for its providing the facilities that cannot be provided by printed material. The conventional practice of writing within strict rules is no more there with the arrival of the blogs and web diaries, which lack professionalism and contain subjectivity, has allowed the external reader to correspond instantly. Blogs and Wikipedia involve writing but there is another more developed website called Flickr where literacy practice is through pictures rather than writing. People upload their photos sharing their interests with the other users. Flickr allows a choice of eight various languages to gain international users and viewers but English is still a preferred language. David Barton calls this type of literacy practice ‘vernacular literacy practice’ which helps the reader to know about the lives of ordinary people of a community. Digital English involves people communicating using SMS, emails etc, and the literacy practice has also been enhanced by the digital books which are just one click away and allow the user to access any kind of information by entering the world of digital technology. Mostly, this text-based interaction between human beings is informal. Online chat often does not involve standard written English, rather it is a typed chat in short form usually abbreviated for efficiency and it can often involve code –switching if used by bilinguals, their style of text and code-switching can reveal their regional identity and social background easily to the recipient. SMS is a wide spread digital facility now-a-days which was originally introduced for the engineers to communicate in the 1990s but its affordance was perceived by the public and now it plays an essential role in many social lives. This affordance of digital technology has led to the exploitation of language which mainly includes respelling and short form. Deumert and Masinyana explain this fashion by giving an example of the SMS that Mzwakhe, a South African who prefers mobile text as it is cheap, has composed containing a local joke ‘2bad one matras’ which reveals his identity, ‘brurr’ for ‘brother’, ’2’ for ‘two’ and ‘c’ for ‘see’ which are used to make all his talk to be conveyed within the character limit of one SMS (Deumert and Masinyana, 2008, p. 127). The people interviewed stated that English was an easy language regarding short form and being able to convey their message in few words. Moreover, they used local language for serious and personal purposes (U214, DVD 2, Clip 15.1, ‘Mobile life and the mobile phone’). To conclude, the advances in communication technology has shaped the literacy practices of English speakers by the simple and much trouble-free access to the written language. Every person in society can access simple or complex readings and enhance his own knowledge easily, and the written communication has progressed into instant form which allows people to keep in touch with people living miles away. References Anderson, B. (2006) ‘Print-English’ in Allington, D., (ed) (2012) Material English’, Abingdon,  Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 286-288. Allington, D., (ed) (2012) ‘Symbols and spaces in early medieval British literacy: Material  English’,  Abingdon, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, p. 276. Allington, D., (ed) (2012) ‘To  write, to print and to read: Material English’,  Abingdon, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 278-279. Allington, D. and Hewings, A. (eds) (2012) ‘Multimodal literacy and culture difference: Reading and writing in English’, Abingdon, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, p. 72. Barton, D. (2012) ‘Vernacular writing on the web’ in Barton, D. And Panen, U. (eds) The  Anthology of Writing, Understanding Textually Meditated Worlds, London, Continuum, pp. 112-25. Deumert and Masinyana, (2008) ‘Extract 2’ in Tagg, C. (ed) (2012) Digital English Abingdon Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, p,314. Eliot, (2007) ‘Mass literacy and social change’ in Allington, D., (ed) (2012) Material English’,  Abingdon, Routledge/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 283-285. Open University, (2012) U214 Worlds of English, ‘DVD 2 Mobile life and the mobile phone’, Alan Owen, The Open University.     Read More