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July 15, 2004
Speaking Searchspeak
Posted by David Weinberger
After a meeting at Yahoo last week, I got to talking with one of the people in charge of search. He said casually that he thinks they’re seeing more complex searches without “stop” words, i.e., the ordinary words like “the” and “of” that search engines generally ignore. In other words, search engines are training us how to talk to them.
And aren’t IM and SMS text-messaging becoming free of stop words also? When we use them, we tend to abbreviate them: “r u there?”
SMS, IM or search engines are all beginning to speak the same language — one stripped to the minimum number of signifiers in order to communicate. And thus language heads into becoming a code, not a world.
Comments (6)
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1. flipsockgrrl on July 16, 2004 1:24 AM writes...
I think the elision habit developed before search engines: cast your mind back to your earliest memories of paying attention to the news on TV. Typically at the start of a news bulletin or a new item, the newsreader will give you the headline, sans verbs and often also without personal pronouns or definite/indefinite articles.
In turn the TV practice, I believe, evolved from the lingusitic style of newspaper headlines.
Where does it end? Might we perhaps continue condensing our conversational language to the extent of (say) Latin, where one hardly ever needs a pronoun, conjunction or article?
I'm guessing "yes", but it'll take several more generations before this kind of conciseness becomes the norm.
Permalink to Comment2. Seth Finkelstein on July 16, 2004 7:41 AM writes...
"And thus language heads into becoming a code, not a world."
??? I lost you here. You seems to make a big leap from
"People use abbreviated language in certain constrained context"
to ... what ...
Language Itself Is Changing, And What Does It All Mean ... ?
[that is, this is what I thought the last part meant]
If you really want *code*, look into the telegraph phrase books used by businessmen during the heyday of the telegraph.
Permalink to CommentIt makes IM message seem positively verbose.
3. Reed on July 16, 2004 8:12 AM writes...
What does "language heads into becoming a code, not a world" mean? What language is not a code? And what does it mean for a language to be a world?
Permalink to Comment4. David Weinberger on July 16, 2004 10:07 AM writes...
Yes, telegraphs and headlines both created their own abbreviated patois, but IM (less so SMS) is conversational, and that seems different to me; I think it makes it more likely that it will affect over forms of rhetoric. But, what do I know?
As for language vs. code... Code assigns an unambiguous symbol to an unambiguous referent. You understand code by de-coding it, looking up the symbols. Codes fail when they are ambiguous. OTOH, language only succeeds (IMO) insofar as it is ambiguous. Further, we only "de-code" language when it fails to communicate. Further further, (IMO) isn't a symbolic representation of the world but is (a) how we turn toward the world together and (b) is inseparable from how our world presents itself to us as a world...as a context of meaning.
I hope that makes everything perfectly clear ;)
Permalink to Comment5. Seth Finkelstein on July 16, 2004 10:20 AM writes...
"I hope that makes everything perfectly clear ;)"
Err ... no. :-)
As much as I can, umm, decode, it, I read you as saying something like
"Making frequent use of a low bit-rate communications channel will degrade the ability to use any higher-bit-rate communications channel, as the bad mental habits from using the former will infect the usage of latter".
This is a pretty common assertion, dressed up in many ways - but it doesn't seem to be true, as shown in fact by its commonness and general repetition in various guises.
Permalink to Comment6. Ravi on July 20, 2004 6:15 AM writes...
Would you say efforts at creating Q&A type search (MS is doing research on this) engines is a movement in the opposite direction for language to survive in its current shape?
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