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Technolingualism |
Do you use language—spoken, written, or signed—to communicate? Do you use technology to communicate with language? If you can answer yes to one or both of these (admittedly rhetorical) questions—and we’re guessing that you can— then this book is for you. More specifically, this is a book about you: both the language you use and the technology you use to communicate with language.
The 200-odd pages that lie before you explore the processes and products of a dynamic interaction between language and technology, a phenomenon we’re calling technolingualism. And at the heart of this phenomenon, we’ll see, lies the proposition that technology not only shapes but is also shaped by language. The flow of influence, in other words, runs both ways. On the one hand, technology can give rise to new linguistic structures, practices, and ideologies. Conversely - and this other half of the story often goes unacknowledged - language can also inspire technology, whether its physical shape or its operational design.
In short, technolingualism is the technological and linguistic consequences of the mutually influential relationship between language and technology.
What’s more, it turns out that you, me, and all those who can at the least read the very words of this sentence bear the sociolinguistic marks of technolingualism. We are, to put it baldly, technolinguals. For this reason alone this book is both for and about you, Dear Reader.
Our exploration of technolingualism unfolds in six stages (aka chapters), in which we consider eight different communication technologies. In Chapter 1 we look at the textualization of language, a quantum leap for spoken language that occurred with the invention of writing, arguably the greatest communication technology. Chapter 2 covers the printing press and typewriter, which, we argue, resulted in a mechanization of language. In Chapter 3 we level our sights on the telegraph and telephone, making the case that these two technologies brought about an abstraction of language. In Chapter 4 we take a linguistic dive into the realm of ones and zeros, arguing that computer technology led to a digitization of language. Chapter 5 tackles the cell phone and canvasses the technolingualism that arises out of the mobilization of language. Our final chapter spotlights the cochlear implant, a game-changing technology that has impacted hundreds of thousands of speakers around the world and which, we argue, has amounted to a regeneration of language. At each stage along our investigative journey, and for each technology, we address how language both shaped and was shaped by the technology.
Ultimately, this book seeks answers to the following pair of questions:
• How do language and technology interact?
• What happens, to either or both, as a result of this interaction?
If these questions interest you, Dear Reader—if you want to learn more about yourself and your language, and the technology that has shaped and been shaped by them.
If you like to browse the book at Amazon
