Review Article New Media - New Language? Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich The field of Communication and Media studies has expanded considerably in the past couple of decades. The output of publications in this field increases every year, but most of them deal with media from a sociological or a psychological point of view. “Relatively few have investigated the language of the media in depth - surprisingly perhaps, since language is at the core of media communication”, the editors write in their introduction to a collection of essays devoted to explore present day media language. 1 The authors are not only academics, but also journalists; this contributes to a dialogue well balanced between theory and practice, empirical analysis and self-observation. It also makes the book pleasant to read. It is divided into four sections with five chapters each, dealing with different aspects of the topic. The first part on modern media discourse contains five chapters investigating changes in the forms of media communication in recent years. The second part on modes of the media explores the ways in which media discourse is realised today. The third part focuses on the ways in which the representation of particular topics can influence the perception of the audience addressed. The fourth part illustrates some changes in our everyday communicative behaviour caused by the needs of the new media. For the sake of a quick overview, I will give a brief account of each of the twenty chapters. Allan Bell gives the example of two media reports on south-pole expeditions at the beginning and at the end of the 20 th century and explains the influence of social circumstances and technological innovation on the style, the grammar, the content, and the textual design of these reports both in newspapers and on television. With regard to the development of new technologies of communication, Raymond Snoddy maintains that new media will not replace old media but will be a complement to them; he argues for a strong public service to guarantee a plurality of programmes; and his prognosis on the effect of globalisation is an increase of local diversity of networks with different languages and cultural values. Globalisation is also the focus of Deborah Cameron’s contribution. She argues that it is not languages (English) that will be globalised, but norms of discourse. With this in mind, Cameron argues that some of the following maxims are relevant irrespective of the situation of their use: talk is preferred to silence, direct speech acts rather than indirect ones, symmetry rather than hierarchy, cooperation rather than competition, openness rather than taciturnity. These recommendations stem from North American traditions of therapy and are spread by the media. Robin T. Lakoff examines the change of politeness norms in public discourse over the K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 27 (2004) No. 3-4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich 302 time and finds that impoliteness and vulgarity in speech behaviour are by no means a sign of our contemporary times only. They may be an attempt by new groups to be admitted to the community of public discourse, demanding the right to free speech by testing its limits. Martin Conboy takes a closer look at the British tabloid press and shows how it interprets topics of global interest in a popular way, thereby at the same time reducing their international relevance. The low level of language aims at establishing a community between the medium and its audience as a basis for its own economic growth. In the second part, modes of the media, John Carey explores differences and similarities between newspaper reporting, general reportage and literature. He comes to the somewhat paradoxical conclusion that the genre of reportage of today depends on the truth without being able to prove it. David Hendy looks how radio broadcasting tries to find its way between elitist and popular registers with specific reference to Britain’s BBC Radio Four. Angela Kessler and Alexander Bergs compare love letters then and now (in pre-electronic times and via text messages today) and find no evidence for a decline of reading or writing abilities; rather, the new media supports the development of linguistic creativity. Naomi S. Baron analyses verbal and para-verbal features of e-mails and face-to-face spoken language and finds their similarities as a common expression of the modern trend towards more relaxed forms of conversation and social conventions. Diana M. Lewis asks whether online news is a new genre as compared to traditional news reporting. She points to the enormous amount of data which has to be visualised in limited space. Links lead to all over the world, not always indicating the geographical distribution of the content. On the other hand, certain topics may lead to other news communities - where media globalisation meets with computer individualisation. Part three, entitled representations and models, is opened by a chapter of Malcolm Gluck on wine language. He illustrates the difficulties associated with professionally describing the sensual experience of taste. Wine language, with its inflation of metaphors, he argues, is about to lose its descriptive and inter-subjective value if not supplemented by what he calls prototypes (well defined expressions) to characterise wines by comparison. Alan Partington investigates the rhetoric of spin-doctors using language as a weapon against critical journalists. He describes the stylistic tools of hiding the underlying intention of what is communicated to the public. Jennifer M. Wei gives an example for intercultural differences in news broadcasting by looking at the use of metaphor in Taiwanese political discourse. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus analyses a particular show on family and education within the BBC talkshow series ‘Kilroy’. She explains the strategies of the talk monitor Kilroy, who manages to manipulate the audience to cooperate with him as he organises the structure of the conversation and at the same time gives it the feeling of free emotional expression. Catherine Evans Davies describes Martha Stewart as the ideal host of an internationally successful talk show in the United States (‘Martha Stewart Living’) and as an example of how to promote identification of a mass audience with an image presented in the media. Part four is devoted to the effect of the media on language, for linguists interested in present day English probably the most interesting part of the book. Yibin Ni examines noun phrases as a typical feature of media language and presents a quantitative analysis of the distribution of noun phrases in various genres of media language compared to academic writing and everyday discourse. Douglas Biber expands on this and shows how limited space has led to an increased density of style, mainly in the form of noun phrases holding a maximum of information. John Ayto explores the function of media in creating and spreading neologisms, especially so-called ‘blends’ (such as brunch for breakfast and lunch). Interest- New Media - New Language? 303 ingly, dictionaries with the most blends of this kind were those based on a corpus of newspapers, a reliable source of data for dictionaries in the 20 th century. John Simpson wonders whether new media language of e-mails, of the Internet and so on will have the same function in the 21 st century. In her concluding chapter, Jean Aitchison looks at descriptions of the events of September 11, 2001 in newspapers and the web. She shows how such shocking events create an extreme desire for articulation and new expressions. Many of the most used expressions can still be noticed in language use even years later. Most of the chapters are based on papers presented at a conference at the University of Oxford in 2001. As such they do not go into great detail, but give a good overview of the present state of the discussion in this field. Therefore, the book can be recommended to everybody interested in the role of the media in language change (i.e. English) and in linguistic implications of public communication today. However, potential buyers of the book should not be misled by the title of the book. Most of it deals not so much with language in the “new media”, but rather traditional ones such as newspapers and television (some chapters devoted to wine language etc. not even that). Readers interested in the language use of the Internet, of e-mail correspondence, of chat-room conversations, of hypertext systems and the like, should probably look elsewhere for new results of research on these forms of speech and their influence on our everyday communication rituals which are increasingly shaped by the norms and rules introduced by new media in the stricter sense of the word. Notes 1 Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis (eds.) 2003: New Media Language, London: Routledge, 209 + xiv pp. ISBN 0415283043 (pbk)