6:1 IDK My BFF Jill

Instant message and texting jargon, as Cingular showed us in their popular commercial, has become a language of its own. Abbreviations have not only become standard procedure when you are attempting to do your blog assignment, facebooking, checking uportal, and instant messaging all at the same time, they have become a necessity. Veterans of instant message conversations can tell after only a brief conversation with someone whether or not they are in touch with teen culture that has been personified through AIM and text messaging. In other words, there is a certain standard of formalness during online synchronous forms of conversation that people have reached a consensus.

Individuals get better and better at conversing according to the slang norm the more they interact in the online space. My mom (coincidentally named Jill) still proofreads each instant message she writes before she sends it. The messages she sends me, if spoken, would be completely normal. But simply because we are interacting via instant messaging, I start laughing at her apostrophes, semi-colons, and capitalizations. To her credit, she has been attempting to conform towards the norm. However, instant messaging is a unique online space because there is such thing as over conforming. My mom recently discovered Omicrons, and inserts one in essentially every sentence. While the disappointed face does not leave much to the imagination, it is not a requirement for me to figure out that she is unhappy that I dropped one of my classes.

Inherent in most norms, there has to be some kind of backlash, whether formal or informal, that causes people to conform. We call this the Leviathan, or the power that enforces and provides punishment to those that refuse to conform to accepted norms and standards. In regard to instant messaging, finding the Leviathan may prove to be much easier than one thinks. Any person who has a screen-name can transform into the Leviathan in the face of non-conformism. We all can remember a time talking online where someone wrote us a message in which the content was totally acceptable, but there perfect grammar made us raise our eyebrows. Often times we let the transgression go unpunished, but sometimes the conduct is egregious enough where we make a cutting witty remark such as, “Take it easy on the grammar, colleges don’t even really count the writing portion of the SATS anyway.” Maybe I’m out of touch (doubtful), but I don’t think abbreviations have taken over quite to the extent that Cingular would lead us to believe. Just like my mom’s omicron phase, she realized that too much of a hip thing can yield the same result as talking like you are in the middle of a business interview.

Online language norms are part of an unmoderated setting as described by Wallace. In other words, there is no designated volunteer who goes around talking to random people via instant message and screens them for their ability to converse in correct mix of abbreviations, grammar, and conventional sentence structure. In fact, if such a job did exist, it would be steeped in irony, as the person who is attempting to enforce the norm would be at the same time the chief culprit of its primary social bylaws. Wallace also discusses how online CMC norms can cause greater group polarization than those created in face-to-face interactions. However, this only occurs if “the members of the group feel some sense of group identity”(Wallace 78). I would argue that while their may be sub-norms of online jargon within the overall population, there is no salient instant message group identity that causes the types of polarization effects that Wallace discusses. I have not seen in my experience someone who chooses to remain defiantly formal in online verse, nor have I seen someone actually use the abbreviation “TISNF.”

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