lilula

In Progress: Study of Digital Writing Spaces

“Cyberspace is composed of a variety of social media — email, mailing lists, listservers, bulletin boards, chat rooms, multi-user domains (MUDs), virtual worlds, game spaces — that support social interaction between people who are geographically dislocated. Many commentators now view the fostering of social interaction as the most significant aspect of cyberspace. Indeed, there is no denying that these social media are used every day and inhabited by millions of people talking, discussing, arguing, flirting, playing, and chatting with one another.” — Atlas of Cyberspace

The internet provides a challenging environment for language. Its culture is constantly changing as the individual and collective denizens of the web latch onto rapidly occurring memes that present new opportunities to experiment with words. One example of this would be the lolspeak, which appears to be poorly written English but in actuality requires an intimate knowledge of the language in order to convincingly rearrange and misuse verbs, gerunds, prepositional phrases and syntax.

This study of the digital writing space is an ongoing endeavour to better understand how language is used online. Starting from how we communicate through verbal and vocal language, my research will cover areas in typography, language, online identity, writing spaces and ephemera.