Doing a sociolinguistic study of electronic mail would seem inappropriate in that ordinarily sociolinguists are concerned with speech events, and not written texts (except for transcriptions of taped speech), which they often leave to literary critics, communications researchers, or content analysts. Further, generally such speech events are studied in unmediated (face-to-face) contexts, rather than through mediated contexts (such as telephone or CB radio conversations.) Electronic mail is written (or more properly, typed) and mediated. However, as one researcher has noted, email shares the attributes of spoken conversation (especially when the exchange is interoffice or in some other local network), and displays the volatility, evanescence, immediacy, familiarity, and directness of speech. On the other hand, it lacks the paralinguistic features of speech (voice intonation and body language cannot be detected), and it has the deliberative quality of letter writing, in that the person can revise repeatedly what they want to "say" before "saying" it. Whether or not email is speech or writing (or something in between), it involves the use of language, and even if it seems to erase some real-world social variables (whether it actually does so is subject to debate), it still takes place in a social context.
Certain features of email have been discussed almost to death. Since an email message must be typed using the limited 256-character ASCII set (the 'lingua franca' for all computer systems), and cannot employ changes in font, style, or color, it is a highly restricted form of communication. At this point, almost everyone is familiar with the fact that, since emotional cues are missing due to the lack of paralinguistic features, email users seek to avoid miscommunication by conveying emotion through the use of the so-called "emoticons" or "smileys," small facial expressions formed through the use of sideways juxtapositions of keyboard characters. Furthermore, almost everyone is familiar with the long-discussed problem of "flaming", in which the misinterpretation of someone's comments (due to this same lack of emotional cues, mild sarcasm can come across as bitter attack) in an email message lead to a long torrent of accusations and insults. In this paper, I wish to propose some new sociolinguistic hypotheses, and present a proposal in which these hypotheses could be tested.
First, I suggest, there is an attempt to create a standard for email communication. This process of standardization is in progress, and for these reasons provides an interesting way for sociolinguists to examine the creation of standards. Second, people who fall short of this emergent standard (since it's not really yet codified) or violate other norms of electronic communication because they are new to it are likely to receive the secondary social status of "newbie," and lose face as a result of it. Third, on email lists, those people who most closely approach the standard and also display various techniques of verbal mastery are likely to have the most social power, "speak" most frequently, and be listened to the most. In concluding, I will suggest ways in which these hypotheses can be tested in a long-term research project.
Thus, a large portion of netiquette concerns the search for a standard for electronic mail. Electronic mail is already 'standardized' to a certain extent because all systems use the same character set, physical-electronic protocols (TCP/IP), and encoding methods - a necessity for a global network. But these standards are merely for the software and hardware that makes the communication possible, not how users employ it. The de facto language of the Internet is English, for the simple fact that the numerical majority of Internet-linked computers are in English-speaking countries, especially the United States, and English is still considered a lingua franca for international business and trade and so forth. However, there is no statement of use on the Internet which specifies which variety , register, or style of English is to be used, and this results in the "Babel" of communication which users so frequently decry in their rush to create a standard. The standard that Internet users are trying to create is loosely based on ordinary Standard English, but it is a modified code with additional features in order to reflect the realities of e-mail. Here I wish to suggest what these linguistic rules may be and who the agencies are that are pushing for their implementation as standards.
At this point, these should be seen as informal expectations of people. They are in no way officially codified. Many of them are contextual to the context in which electronic mail is being used (professional or academic setting.) Indeed, there remains a great deal of disagreement over some of these items even among experienced e-mail users. People are expected to acquire knowledge of these norms through observation, imitation, and informal socialization. It is because of the informality and irregularity of this process that there have been calls for codification by the Internet Society or other organizations - something that should be familiar with sociolinguists who have researched the processes of standardization. In the meantime, new Internet users are continually being exposed to these norms in sudden and painful ways, when they are sharply attacked by old-timers for their mistakes and violations.
Old-timers have social power because supposedly they were around when Internet was harder to use (everything was UNIX line prompts instead of point-and-click) and thus they are thought to have greater knowledge and mastery. Because they have 'been around' for such a long time, they are better expected to have received the informal socialization into 'netiquette.' The old-timers feel they played an active role in shaping the Internet into the open, rational, consistent system that it is today. "Newbies" who have just arrived through AOL or other commercial systems are viewed like people who watch commercial TV are by PBS watchers - as "the great unwashed," uncultured, crass, seeking the lowest common denominator. They are assumed to be ignorant of the technology and also the informal rules that are governing its use. Old-timers see newbies as parasites - people preying on the system they created, turning it into something they never wanted it to be.
Social power on mailing lists mostly means one receives more attention to their postings, more perfunctory adulations and 'right ons' for what they post, and more people willing to provide advice and information when they ask for it. Those with social power on mailing lists tend to dominate the discourse, and people tend to go along with their judgements of other users and what they post. They tend to set the tone for the entire list based on their preferences as to what needs to be discussed and what doesn't. Their minor mistakes tend to be easily overlooked and forgiven. In contrast, the social powerlessness of the newbie is often experienced through a lack of attention from other people on the list, a marginalization of their opinions and comments, and derision and ridicule. Personally, I have witnessed social power on mailing lists take on all kinds of amazing manifestations, including people leaving the list nominating their appointed successors for 'list guru!'
Whereas peoples' speech is often evaluated based on its phonology, their written communication (and by inference, their social status, etc.) is usually judged by its morphology (proper use of conjugation, contraction, etc.) and lexical fluidity. However, because a computer screen is a more versatile way of arranging text than a typewriter, and allows for text manipulations that are more precise than those in handwritten letters, other criteria come into evaluating e-mail messages. E-mail messages thus are judged also based on the textual devices the person employs, and even things such as spacing, ASCII embellishments (such as text outline boxes), and alignment. This is interesting since, while such tricks are available to people in conventional computer word processors, they are more often used in e-mail than in print documents. It is also problematic, since the versatility a person may have in creating e-mail may be dependent on the system they are using (Emacs, PINE, RiceMail, Eudora, Pegasus Mail, Tin, etc.)
A person's lack of resident software for generating the textual manipulations that give e-mail messages 'impact' often cannot be assessed by other users, and thus their non-use of such items is assumed to be based on choice or ignorance. People are routinely flamed for things that appear in their messages which are artefacts of their mail gateway, and not things they put in originally (such as the =20 ending that some mail routers insert as a linefeed marker at the end of each line.) Thus, what ends of up happening is this; those who have the most versatile mail software can generate the most versatile e-mail messages. These people often command the most social power on mailing lists. Since the best software is available to those with the money to buy it (of course), what is happening implicitly is another connection is forged between economic and social power - this time through net linguistic competence.
Testing of my hypotheses would mean that the data would be analyzed in the following way. Messages would be coded (using content analysis techniques) as follows: plus one point for positively demonstrating or exceeding a norm (as outline above), minus one point for violating a norm. Each message would have a score, which would add or detract from the cumulative score of their originator. Message posters on the list would receive a cumulative score based on their repeated offenses (or demonstrations of their mastery of the standard). Thus, repeated "spammers" or "flamers" and so on would likely receive overall negative scores, whereas people who flamboyantly display adherence to these norms repeatedly would likely receive high overall positive scores. It would then be interesting to determine how long people had been on the Internet and how this correlated with their scores.
Furthermore, it could then be examined whether people with high positive scores (high obedience to the norms of the standard) commanded high social power on the list (based on side interactions with other users), and whether people were judged to be "newbies" when they had high negative scores, even if they were relatively experienced users. It could be tested whether actual "newbies" who displayed mastery of the standard (perhaps having read a book on e-mail etiquette before getting online) were judged to be experienced users, or at least allocated greater social power on the list. This research gives sociolinguists the opportunity to observe how social status is allocated according to perceived linguistic competence - in an ongoing social process. Unlike "offline" language standards, the standard for email is still coalescing. We can observe who is setting the standards, how they are getting people to comply, and most importantly, why they are doing this.