Unless someone has printed this and the following sentences off as a hard copy and handed it to you, you are on the internet now. That means you've had some experience with language on the internet. That's qualification enough.
How do you feel the internet has changed the English language?
This is a tough question! My response is somewhat narrow and doesn't capture the breadth of what's now happening vis-a-vis the Web and language -- but I suppose it's *one* example of the changes I've seen and thought about more deeply.
ReplyDeleteTo me, the most noticeable elements of mediated writing and communication involve immediacy, as well as perceptions of ephemerality vs. permanence. I think that writing has become increasingly more visible, especially the more immediate, earlier versions of what we write. We have immediate access to public fora, regardless of how many drafts or versions or reviews our texts have gone through. I think this, in part, contributes to the alarmism surrounding traditional literacy (and grammar and misspellings and whatever else). But I also think that we (we meaning web users writ large) often fail to consider the permanence of the technologies we use. We might consider texting or tweeting or blogging to be public acts, but perhaps not quite as public as, say, a book or news article, because we perceive mediated communication to be more ephemeral. (That is, we don't think about archiving, despite warnings about stuff never going away on the internet.)
I'll stop here now. :) I don't know that I answered your question -- let me know if I didn't!