Evolutions in email style and usage

Online and mobile communication through Web, email, chat and virtual worlds has raised perplexing questions about language change and unleashed a torrent of public discourse about the impact of emerging technologies on the linguistic and orthographic dimensions of computer-mediated communication (CMC), the shared rules for achieving linguistic competence in those media, and the long-term effects of CMC on unmediated discourse and mainstream usage. This article reviews through the lens of qualitative grounded-theory analysis an international corpus of 272 prescriptively-related print-media accounts (2001-2009) of language use and communication practices in email and other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as text-messaging and instant messaging, and the influence of mobile telephony on particular features and practices of email. This metadiscourse-the popular journalistic framing and depiction of computer-mediated discourse (CMD)-reveals ideological assumptions about linguistic practices and how rules related to forms of address, message length, allowances for speech-like qualities and other email style features evolve from user-generated strategies and come to be codified, institutionalized and understood in mainstream usage. Examples from the corpus of media representations demonstrate the privileging of certain claims about email practice, netiquette, and message construction and how the conventions users arrive at are shaped by new technology use.