ИНТЕРНЕТ-КОММУНИКАЦИЯ В ЛИНГВИСТИЧЕСКОМ И КОГНИТИВНОМ АСПЕКТЕ

The burden of the paper is to investigate the impact of digital technologies upon our life. It aims at exposing linguistic and cognitive distinctions of internet communication that are of creative and social value. Internet communication has already produced an unprecedented quantity of various discursive and semiotic innovations: new terminology, neologisms, occasional expressions, other cognitively charged instruments for expressing one’s ideas, attitudes, etc. An obvious evolution of the cyberspace is now unstoppable, making a scientific interpretation of its verbal and non-verbal innovations more important. For instance, we can find several names/ terms for an innovative technology of combining objective and virtual reality: mixed/ blended/ mediated/ augmented/ enhanced reality. Such terminology cases are common nowadays, they need terminological and cognitive comments, and, perhaps, innovative ones.

Cognitive and linguistic innovations in the internet can be characterized as diverse, creative, “intellectually charged”, etc. They cover all possible elements of communicative interaction, discursive activities, stylistic genres, modes of expressing one’s ideas, purposes, etc. Most vividly such innovations can be demonstrated by new words, notions and expressions that refer to new objects, subjects, events, happenings, facts, etc. that appear in the internet interaction itself. Cf. Inet, internet/ virtual civilization, virtual urbanism, internet citizens, internet stylistics, net-stylistics, on-line stylistics, cyber-stylistics, netlistics, hypertextual/ non-linea/ interactive stylistics, blog-stylistics, counter-stylistics, anti-stylistics, etc. That is why more and more linguists, philologists, psychologists, semioticians, etc. make internet the object of their close scrutiny.

The central point here, particularly in a social perspective, is that “digital” innovations in the internet language and style testify not only to the effect that “creative technologies” create cognitive and linguistic innovations, but also that they influence the contemporary society, thus demonstrating that the cognitive, the linguistic, and the social are more intimately interconnected than it is commonly supposed. Thus, the study has to expose the connections between the creative and the social in internet interaction.

Two leading innovative trends in internet communication

Internet as an innovative and technologically advanced way of human interaction develops two most important trends in its evolution. The initial one develops under the influence of its semiotic character and provokes deverbalization of internet discourse, which operates with various, diverse and innovative signs, symbols, markers, figures, graphic objects, etc., built into its operational/ software systems. The latter are constantly improving their navigation instruments and introduce new and more effective semiotic, multimodal and hypermodal characters that are becoming more universal, user-friendly, etc. [16], [1]. The second no less important trend in contemporary internet communication, which also promotes its deverbalization, is the bias towards visuality and visualization of digital information flows. The unprecedented progress in web-cameras and their installation almost everywhere devebalize data flows, making them “language-free” (as well as internationally comprehended) [15], [2].

Both leading tendencies in internet communication: its growing semiotic/ hypermodal quality and predominance of visuality in data flows – have as their foundation the cyber-semiotic origin of computerized data processing. It promotes a cyber-semiotic convergence of verbal and non-verbal in communication [7], [8], thus testifying to the effect that the innovative character of internet’s discursive distinctions are predetermined by its digital hardware as well as programming software.

One of the most vivid manifestations of the cyber-semiotic convergence of the verbal and the non-verbal in internet interaction is an unprecedented quantity of innovations introduced into internet’s language and style. Moreover, the innovative cyber-semiotic nature of digital technologies and their unlimited perspectives in information processing cannot but provoke and instigate further innovations in human intelligence, cognition, behavior, interaction, etc., these becoming more interconnected by a transfer of the creative and the cognitive into the linguistic and the social.

Internet as a transfer of the creative into the social

The most important and prospective social characteristic of internet communication is the freedom of interaction, expressing one’s own mind and opinion, as well as the opportunity of displaying one’s own linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, etc. creativity. Thus many specialists express their belief that internet has become a generator of a discursive revolution that erased differences between oral and written speech. It also produced various new graphic rules, symbols, etc.: occasional, humorous, ironic, sarcastic, other expressive discoursive and semiotic “creations”. These innovations become, among other things, the way to transfer the creative and the cognitive into the linguistic and the social. Quite illuminating phenomena in this respect are such innovative creations as texting, textism and textiquette (txting, txtism and txtiquette) of SMS messages. They make a text shorter, compressed, expressive, informative, more effective, and thus have a cognitive background.

Txting, txtism and txtiquette: The internet’s language and style and their estimations

Txting, txtism and txtiquette have introduced (and exploited) a vast variety of new linguistic and semiotic rules of compressed messaging and new forms of interaction, cf. orthographic abbreviations/ contractions: msg – message, tmrw – tomorrow; phonological abbreviations: thru – through, skool – school, thanx – thanks; acronyms/ initialisms: ttyl – talk to you later, omg – oh my God, brb – be right back; clippings/ shortenings: goin – going, feb – February, xam – exam; semiotic (single letter/ number) homophones: c – see, u – you, 2 – to/ too, 4 – for; combined letter/ number homophones: 2day – today, l8r – later; emoticons/ smileys (:-) – happy, :-/ – sad; typographic symbols (x – kiss, <3 – love, @ – at; omissions of punctuation, apostrophes or capitalization: cant – can't, i – I; excessive use of punctuation or capitalization for expressing emphasis: what!!!! – what!, NEVER – never; repeating letters to mirror lengthening: sooo – so, grreeeeenn – green); accent stylizations: gonna – going to, anuva – another, dat – that) neologisms, nonsensical transmogrifications of other words: lolz for lol [laughing out loud] [14], inanities [10], etc.

While some linguists consider txting & txtism to be a “vandalism” [9], others believe that internet’s linguistic and semiotic innovations “re-invent” language, promote its metalinguistic realization, re-creation, etc. The most authoritative internet-linguist, David Cristal, in his famous book “Txtng: The Gr8 Db8” (Texting: The Great Debate) [12], qualifies txtism as a language play, plurality of literacies, language evolution, etc. Contemporary “cybersemiotic” language and style of internet and digital communication, besides stimulating the readers’ and writers’ linguistic, creative and cognitive activities, demand intellectual efforts, habits and practices and thus give rise to a new kind of literacy – the cybersemiotic literacy, which, no doubt, influences traditional writing skills and rules. Writing rules are always evolving. For example, in Shakespeare’s time they were not established yet, that is why the writer himself wrote his own name in six different ways [6]. So, perhaps, we will see how traditional writing rules begin to evolve under the influence of the digital communication and cyber-semiotic literacy. (Which, in its turn, was born by a number of virtual keyboards in digital devises/ gargets that display a vast variety of different, new, concise and attractive symbols, notations, etc.).

Digital communication, cybersemiotic literacy and its examples, names and comments

Digital communication has initiated the cybersemiotic literacy and textism that can be exemplified by the following “traditional” text as opposed to “Netspeak” [11, p. 17]: “At the end of the day, texting and instant messaging are messing up the skills of our youth to read, write and spell or are really good for them or have basically no effect, because at this point, we cannot be sure!” (confused smiley)”. Cf. its “cybersemiotic” translation: “@TEOTD txtN & IM r messin ^ d skilz of our yth 2 read, wrt n spel or r rly gud 4 em or av basicaly no ffct, coz @ dis point we cant B sur! :-” [14, p. 598].

Internet language and style permanently evolve and thus acquire new names and qualifications, cf. electronic language, e-writing, e-language, e-style, computer-mediated communication technology, etc.; cf. “The arrival of Netspeak is showing us homo loquens at its best”… and create “an area of huge potential enrichment for individual languages”… thus, “Human versatility, creativity and search for novelty have not been inhibited but rather instigated by the electronic technologies in a linguistic perspective” [11, p. 241– 242].

Transfer of the cognitive and the linguistic into the social: From internet community to internet society

Intellectually charged internet language and style promote an evolution of social communication: they shorten the distance between the communicators, unite them into social communities, make social interaction less formal, etc. But the most important social benefit introduced by internet is its interactive and creative power, which makes the human feel more independent, knowing, confident, self-sufficient and active. Another no less important internet’s social benefit is its unprecedented feedback, which is now improving all kinds of social relations and make them less “distant”, official, autocratic and impersonal [3], [4]. The perspective of promoting all such gains is to establish contact between various social, cultural, educational, professional, etc. internet communities and blend them into an independent of political parties and their ideologies internet society with prevailing horizontal connections, and thus free of all kinds of pressure, deprivation and manipulation [5].

The main idea of the paper is thus that the innovative and evolving cyber-semiotic character of digital information technologies provokes new creative abilities and “habits” in the human mind that transfer the cognitive into the linguistic, social and cultural. The most important social innovation that is generated by this transition is the possibility of blending interactive internet social communities into active, open, creative and self-sufficient internet societies, void of all kind of manipulation, dependency and pressure. The most important cultural and social characteristic of internet communication and its language and style is the freedom of speech, which has as a cognitive background the cyber-semiotic origin of digital technologies, which, in their turn, promote human communicative and social creativity and activity.