Netspeak the new Newspeak?

I found VanKooten’s project on language to be hauntingly reminiscent of one of the primary notions in George Orwell’s 1984: the degeneration of language into simple contradictions, such as pleasure and pain, good and bad, cold and hot. There are no other shades of meaning beyond these basic dichotomies of pain and pleasure, good and bad. Orwell calls this Newspeak--Newspeak being the device to drive civilization into a climate of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy means, according to Orwell, not needing to think for oneself (Orwell 53). One example of Newspeak is when Winston, the novel’s main character, is given a task at work: “time 17.3.84 bb speech misreported africa rectify” (38). Here, this means that Big Brother--the totalitarian leader in Orwell’s society--had made a false claim about Africa in his speech for the March 17, 1984 edition of the Times news article, and the article needed to be rectified to accommodate Big Brother’s false prediction. I am going to now observe how many words it took me to write my explanation. The sentence explaining Winston’s task took me about 35 words to describe what needed to be done while Newspeak could describe it in (arguably) seven. That is the power of simplicity.

In VanKooten’s project, she calls the language of the internet Netspeak and Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Her most rash example of how Netspeak has altered the use of language is shockingly similar (but obviously not exact) to Orwell’s Newspeak: “hey man wats up imma meet u @ 4 @ the gym c u then.” There is zero punctuation here and only a few coherent words. This, however, makes sense to us because this is, essentially, the “Newspeak” of our time. But while it can be argued that there is a time and place for writing in this manner, the real issue is when people have a hard time differentiating when such a time is appropriate or not. I am reminded of my Junior Honors English teacher in High School; early in the year, my teacher actually had to address the class that the next time he sees an essay that has any form of what is essentially VanKooten’s Netspeak, he was going to give the essay an automatic Zero for a grade. It is ridiculous that even in Honors English, the students could not differentiate when Netspeak was appropriate. The real problem is, therefore, that while it is acceptable to write in Netspeak under certain circumstances, many people of today do not have the knowledge to understand and to differentiate between formal and informal writing. Netspeak, ultimately, strikes me as eerily similar to Orwell’s Newspeak; they are both a slow degeneration of language.