Week 5: Linguistic Characteristics of Difital Communication

As we mentioned in the post before we will be interested in tv-series and movies. One of the largest web site which collects information’s about almost every film, TV series and even more is IMDb. Link to this site is IMBD. We can also find there something that reminds forum but it is more like message board where people are sharing their own opinions on TV series, films, awards and many more.

I think there are many kind of people. The largest group creates people who are really interested in movies and TV series. They are posting their own opinions (we can say reviews) in understandable form (some of them in an incomprehensible form) on movies and TV series they have seen. These people are forming evaluations on films and TV series because they can rate them. Of course nobody can rate films and TV series after registration.

First of December (last count) there were 15,191,834 unique visitors. In average this site have 15,2M unique visitors per month. It is 96 most visited page in USA. Statistic can be found here .

Their forum is organized in sections. First section is called “Trivia! Trivia” there can post people for example who cant remember name of film. Other people can help him find the name for the film. for example (“There was an alien which wanted to go home”). Also in this section we can find Best and Worst. They defined it as “Discussion of the best and worst that film and TV has to offer“. And many more … Link to this forum is here.

Before posting you have to be registered. It is for safety and to avoid some kind of bots which can spam the forum and even to make DDoS attacks. Registration is limited. You have to be at least 13 to create an account on IMDB. Forum is moderated by IMDB staff which is composed of people which are basically living for movies, TV series and happenings in the world of show business.

 Behind the ”Best and worst” topic you can find many different discussion threads about people’s favourite and most disliked movies and tv-series. A few discussion threads that I will concentrate on are called “Best of 2014”, “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” and “What movies did you watch last week (26/01-01/02)?”

Generally, there seems to be quite few characteristics of netspeak on the threads I looked at. Many people write comments with good English and many of the sentences they use are almost full or grammatically correct. One example of this is a sentence in one comment by MusicDefined: “To expand my acting ranks out a little further I’ll follow your lead.” This example is on syntactic level. Before going any further on this level, let us start on the lexical level which consists of the smallest parts of language, such as individual words and symbols.

An example of lexical level on the thread “Poll: Top 25 snubs of the 2000s” is a sentence in a comment from Scott-101: “So glad to see that someone agrees w/ me.” In this sentence the word “with” is shortened to “w/” which is very common for examples on Internet forums and in text messages. In the same comment, Scott-101 uses “b/c” for “because” and “#” for “number”. These ways of shortening words and using symbols for words are too very common in netspeak. Also, Scott-101 answers like this to another person: “Wrong thread. Jerk.” On almost every web site that offers some kind of way to comment the content of the site there are always some people that quite aggressively insult other people. It is of course much easier to call people names behind user names than to their faces.

You can find examples on syntactic level in almost every comment in the three discussion threads I mentioned in the beginning. For example, in the thread “What movies did you watch last week? (26/01-01/02)” Darksidecrew has posted a comment: “Wont be seeing this.” The sentence is not grammatically correct because it has no subject. Daksidecrew has even left out the apostrophe in “won’t”. Of course it is easier and faster to write without any apostrophes or commas, for example. It is very common for netspeak.

http://abroadblogs.newpaltz.edu/blog/2014/04/stayed-tuned-for-application-openings-and-due-dates/

A.P. and J.J.