This digitized life
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Yesterday's Zits:
Then there was the whole Facebook wall rape episode, and…
(Alas, most academic social scientists are sleeping right through the opportunities for in silico ethnography, virtual conversational analysis, psychodynamic data mining, etc.)
JS Bangs said,
April 7, 2010 @ 10:33 am
What a contrast from the usual Zits trope that teenagers speak with their parents only in monosyllabic grunts.
Nick Lamb said,
April 7, 2010 @ 11:03 am
"in silico ethnography"
I had assumed that professionals were worried that it'd be a dangerous niche to enter. If you do a sloppy job of explaining the society of a group who live on an island in the Pacific and go years without meeting outsiders then who will know? But if your 6 month field report on 4chan confuses Tacgnol with Basement Cat you're an instant laughing stock.
There are people trying to document what's happening in online communities, with more (knowyourmeme.com) or less (encyclopedia dramatica) rigour but indeed they don't seem to be academics.
Professional Translation Services Guide said,
April 7, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
Victory, defeat, suspense, pathos, gluttony, conflict, and passion… in text messages?? Hard to imagine. Maybe: vctry, dft, sspns, glttny, cnflct, and pssn…
Aviatrix said,
April 7, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
But knowyourmeme have personaized labcoats! What stronger signifier of academic status could you ask for?
fs said,
April 7, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
@Professional Translation Services Guide: "txtspk" is not so widespread as many highly amused reactionaries seem to think. The advent of T9 text prediction years ago has kind of obviated it in many circles.
blahedo said,
April 7, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
@fs:
T9 and also the advent of full keyboards, usually QWERTY, on most mid- to high-end cell phones, that makes it way less tedious to type.
Chad Nilep said,
April 7, 2010 @ 2:17 pm
(Alas, most academic social scientists are sleeping right through the opportunities for in silico ethnography, virtual conversational analysis, psychodynamic data mining, etc.)
But see Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life (2008), Ling and Pedersen's Mobile Communications: Re-negotiation of the Social Sphere (2005), Susan Herring's Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-cultural Perspectives (1996), work in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and dozens (at least) of articles treating virtual or mediated interaction in sociolinguistic, communications, and anthropology journals over the past decade or so.
michael farris said,
April 7, 2010 @ 2:56 pm
Very much OT: Anybody know what's happened to languagehat, it's been down a few days now….
michael farris said,
April 7, 2010 @ 2:57 pm
That should be:
Anybody know what's happened to languagehat?
Jean-Sébastien Girard said,
April 7, 2010 @ 3:39 pm
@Lamb, you're forgetting TvTropes.org
vanya said,
April 7, 2010 @ 3:59 pm
Michael,
I've been wondering the same thing.
David L said,
April 7, 2010 @ 4:05 pm
some news about LH here
http://abadguide.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/language-hat/#comments
(don't know how to embed a link, sorry)
giedd said,
April 7, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
@fs, @blahedo
Actually, T9 makes txtspk a lot more difficult than spelling words out fully… I've resorted to spelling numbers out because it's just too much of a hastle to scroll through the variations on each key stroke before I get to numbers.
David said,
April 8, 2010 @ 5:41 am
Going off on a tangent: has any English-speaking reader heard the term "face rape" in the sense "someone posting something embarrassing in your name on Facebook when you leave your computer unguarded"? It's the established term in Sweden, but it seems to be a term limited to that country.
Andrew F said,
April 8, 2010 @ 7:58 am
@giedd
On the phones I've used, you can get the digit by holding down the button for a second or two. It's still slow, but not as bad as spelling numbers out.
TB said,
April 8, 2010 @ 8:46 am
giedd, I think that you are agreeing with fs and blahedo! Really, if I was going to write a Zits, it would be about the mom typing "incomprehensible txtspk gibberish" and her son responding in standard spelling, because in my experience that's how it goes. Old people use those abbreviations.
language hat said,
April 8, 2010 @ 9:14 am
I've been having domain name problems, pretty much entirely of my own making. My provider, Gandi, has been using an out-of-date e-mail address, which I could have corrected at any point during the three years since this exact same thing happened but didn't, so I never got the warning notices, and I've lost the password to my Gandi account, blah blah blah, it's all very tedious and I'm having discussions with Gandi about how to deal with it (they are naturally concerned to make sure that I, the person writing to them, am the same person as the legal owner of the domain), and hopefully this will all get resolved soon and I can get back to posting. Thanks for your concern!
Stephen Jones said,
April 8, 2010 @ 9:20 am
Just turn off T9. If you want numbers go through the alternatives till you get numbers.
language hat said,
April 8, 2010 @ 9:39 am
…And it's back! (I finally grasped that I could pay for the domain registration even without formally owning the domain. I am an idiot.)
Dan T. said,
April 8, 2010 @ 10:17 am
Yes, I think some good Samaritan actually paid for the renewal of one of Microsoft's domains that had caused some service of theirs to fail because they forgot to renew it… and eventually got reimbursement from M$ for this.
language hat said,
April 8, 2010 @ 3:18 pm
I'm not sure I could be a good enough Samaritan to bail out Microsoft.
Daniel said,
April 8, 2010 @ 4:02 pm
@Andrew F
"you can get the digit by holding down the button for a second or two"
You are my hero. I don't know how I survived without that knowledge.
Catanea said,
April 8, 2010 @ 6:15 pm
Ah, but we have been told this/these Samaritan/s bailed out Microsoft IN THEIR OWN INTEREST, because MS had let lapse some site they needed. Your altruism is documented and appreciated.
fs said,
April 9, 2010 @ 3:51 am
giedd: yeah, that was my point.