Professor studies link between Internet culture, declining social behavior and language

03/30/99

Dallas Morning News: Person@l Technology

Are you minding your netiquette - your P's and Q's - on the Internet?

With the Internet has come a whole new culture and with it new rules of interaction - even adaptations of language.

Susan C. Herring, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington, has spent the last few years studying that new culture and its rules.

Dr. Herring has authored numerous articles on the subject and edited the book Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.

Her research focused on the Aparnet, the Internet's oldest discussion group. It was used as a link between military and scientific personnel working for the government for 11 years.

From 1975 to 1986, Dr. Herring tested claims that Internet users were ruder and less inhibited when they were online. She also tested theories that users' grammar and spelling degraded over time.

Dr. Herring recently attended the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco to discuss the effects of the Internet on the way people speak and interact both on the computer and away from it.

Dallas Morning News special contributor Rufus Coleman caught up with Dr. Herring recently at her UTA office.

DMN: First, tell us more about the Aparnet and your study.

HERRING: It had been the oldest discussion group on the Internet. If use of the Internet changes language, then we had to look at the long term, (like) the beginning and the end of the Aparnet.

People have been making accusations about the Internet making people less correct in spelling and grammar, but (we found that users) made fewer typos over time.

I sampled every two years and found that the grammar and spelling did not decay. If anything, it improved and remained at a high level.

But I also acknowledge that this was a highly educated group which was advising (the) U.S. military. The group I studied became significantly more informal over time. They would abbreviate words or they would deliberately play with the language. But what we were comparing it to was edited refined material.

The Internet is good for literacy skills. In fact, there are fewer typos over time. It reverses the ill effects of (watching) TV.

DMN: But is playing with the language and using it in such an informal way a good thing?

HERRING: It depends on whether you think informality is a bad thing. We tend to look at the written language for a certain purpose. But what about the written language used to socialize - talking to a friend or a lover? Over time, the written language became increasingly informal - spoken language coming into written language.

It's like contractions, which were at one time strictly prohibited and have been used since the late 18th century. It's reasonable to expect that the Internet will accelerate the trend.

First of all, there's a lot of support for the Internet - money is being poured into it, and the driving forces are white, middle-class, technically savvy males.

The ideology is that technology is going to solve all of our social problems, but then the only people in a place like India who have access (to emerging Internet technology) are the elite.

We are all looking to a time when access will be more generally available.

Whether it means every man, woman and child in the U.S. will have access like the TV - 98 percent of Americans have a TV, 75 percent have more than one - I'm not sure.

I'm impressed by how much people adapt. I think people's adaptability and creative communication is incredibly effective.

The prime example is virtual sex. The idea of anything remotely satisfying or any physical action requires more channeling than just face-to-face activity like talking. But on the Internet, people have made it so that you can perform an (animated sexual) act just by . . . (typing in commands). You can't perform an action by telling someone about it on the phone.

People use capital letters to be shouting or underlining for emphasis. There are all sorts of things, creative and expressive - laughter from writing ha-ha, smiling faces with the colon and parenthesis.

Or I've seen people type LOL (laughing out loud), LOL, LOL, as if LOL were a pulse of laughter.

DMN: What are some of the other effects you came across in your study?

HERRING: One effect is that even those who are civil and polite become rude.

Why? Some people say it's inevitable with computer-mediated technology. On the Internet, there is low social accountability - a lot of people don't know each other and will never meet. There's a lot of strangers talking to strangers talking.

Another reason might be that you're talking into a keyboard. Because the medium is impersonal, people become impersonal.

Studies show that boys are more aggressive than girls, but there's a lot of social conditioning. I don't think the males thought they were rude. They didn't take it that seriously.

The same standards take place on the Internet - it's called flaming (making insults on the Net). People will say things that they wouldn't say when somebody could punch them in the nose. And people who work together tend to not be rude to each other on the Internet.

If my hypothesis is right, people will not carry these behaviors over where there isn't a high acceptability.

We did an experiment with four subjects - two interacted by computer and two interacted in person. And some of the groups were told that whatever they talked about, their views would be questioned by an expert the next morning. It made no difference, whether it was by computer or in person - people who thought they would talk with an expert were much more polite than those who didn't know of an expert.

That's why I'm doing this type of research. It's important to know what are the effects of this social medium. People blame computers for things they see and dislike on the Internet. It's a combination of the computer with the lack of social accountability.

DMN: Who are the people on the Internet and in the chatrooms?

HERRING: The younger generation is more comfortable with the Internet. There are lots more young people in the chatrooms, which are entirely social. The average is between 18 and 23. Some speculate that chatrooms today are what phone calls were.

The discussion groups are a lot older; the talk is more serious in subject. The average age is from 25 to 35. And there are plenty that are even older. Some scholars say the chatrooms go beyond interactivity to hyperactivity.

The appeal is that it allows people to interact at the same time with different people; people can multitask in their social interaction.

For instance, on a group for teen sex, boys get on and want to know where all the girls are. And when a girl comes on, she'll be swamped with millions of e-mails from all the guys - it's the belle of the ball phenomena. I think girls like it and think that this is great.

DMN: Why do people have these misconceptions about the Internet?

HERRING: We have utopian visions and distopian visions about the Internet. The utopian vision (is that it) can change the world. The distopian vision is that everyday people are becoming more hostile and fragmented.

Adults complained about their kids spending all of their time watching TV. Now they're spending all of their time in chatrooms.

I believe it's important to see what is really happening rather than theorizing about any technology being used for good or bad.

We're really talking about the Internet because it's new, unlike the TV.

The uninformed opinion thinks they've seen a decline in literacy rates, but they don't look at physical fitness - computers and TV have made us less physical. TV is a passive medium, where as the Internet is an active one that promotes a democratic, multiuniversal dialogue, but it does seem to have costs.

One cost is information overload. There is a tremendous amount of junk on the Internet.

Some say it would be nice to have more moderation, and some commercial services provide that. Some people view it as a service; others think it's reprehensible. But a computer democracy is going to create undesirable results. There may be rudeness or annoyances.

When children come into play, it causes problems. Some people have wanted to create another Internet for education purposes. They feel that there needs to be a filter.

There's no guarantee that people will adhere to any type of standards. The good is mixed with the bad, noise mixed with the truth. But I see the utility of moderating the Internet and filtering it.

DMN: What are the guidelines that people should follow on the Internet?

HERRING: There are guidelines for netiquette. If they say anything about flaming, it's that there is no flaming unless the person has a chance to respond. Other rules are things like don't waste bandwidth, don't spam or go on and on.

Netiquette guidelines are concerned with flaming. A lot of netiquette guidelines emerge from discussion groups.

DMN: What are some other netiquette rules?

HERRING: New members should lurk for a while before they post - read before posting.

Don't ask a question that's already been asked a million times - refer to a FAQ (frequently asked questions list).

Use subject lines to refer to what the message is about. Keep public messages brief in discussion groups.

Generally, profanity is not tolerated. Neither is behavior that everyone agrees is hostile and that can generally be a problem.

There is a famous case called the Lambda Mu Rape in which a fellow who called himself Mr. Buggle portrayed graphically violent actions to females in a MUD (multi-user dimensions, a sort of Dungeons & Dragons on the Internet) group.

Mr. Buggle was a 21-year-old college student. He wrote about women in the group as if he had raped them. Members of the group talked about it online and decided something had to be done. The students said it doesn't count as rape - it was just words. He said he was just playing around. But they terminated his character.

The problem was enforcement. Basically, he just changed his e-mail address and came back into the group to do the same things.

DMN: So what type of enforcement is there on the Internet?

HERRING: There is a trend toward public humiliating called toading. The wizard or the leader of the chat group changes a character into a toad, which just means that people can insult and humiliate him in a public space. It's like in medieval times when a person is put in stocks and people stone them. It's devised for those who felt powerless.

Other times if people feel uncomfortable, the main programmer in the group can limit the options of a user by typing in programming.

There's a lot of peer pressure. Flaming is a form of social regulation. A lot of people say, "I flame to keep people in line." They'll say, "If he has the right to say these things, then I have the right to flame."

DMN: Is any of the rudeness going away? Are things like flaming and the sense that you can get away with anything on the Internet going away?

HERRING: I think it's already happening. We've already seen the peak of lawlessness. There are more and more netiquette rules and a wider group of people using the Internet.

My father is on the Internet, and there are a bunch of seniors finding community - there's a SeniorNet and senior chatrooms.

More and more children are using the Net. Because of children, there's a move to prevent access to pornography. Because of concern about children, there's more public discussion about the Internet.

Awareness is growing. Already there are trends under way. Whether it's good or bad depends on who does it and for what purposes.

Rufus Coleman is a reporter at the Arlington Morning News.