Chapter 15: Revoicing Txt

This chapter offers an explanatory framework for the respellings associated with new technology text types such as e-mail, Internet chat, SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging, and instant messaging. I start by considering some of the features and patterns of U.K. adolescents’ use of such writing and of the information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled semiotic resources of electronic text. I argue that ICT has enabled an extended set of orthographic resources that users can draw on to inflect their purposes and project their identities. It has offered an extended orthographic palette in place of the normative binary choices of print technology. I argue that such respelling is not new but recycles popular but relatively undocumented practices from trade names, popular culture, and children’s transitional orthographies. In the second half of the chapter I go on to consider the contextual pressures that act on users’ choices. ICT and the Internet have not so much changed spelling as reregulated what counts as spelling, and in so doing, there is a challenge to the official educational discourses of literacy, and particularly as they apply to orthography. In the globalized context there is a question beyond the reach of this chapter. Are these practices better thought of as localized to the experience of the complexities of the arcane English orthographic “system,” or are they a case in a glob-localized disruption to orthography and literacy in the Internet and language paradigm that has followed the age of print?