"Wipe that smile off your face"

Xina: [walking into living room] Alannagh!!! Are you surfing the Internet again?!

Alannah: No, I'm working on my blog...

Xina: Your blog?...[coming to screen] God, looks like an exciting blog...not.

Alannah: Yeah, I know...it's for school.

Xina: Why don't you create a personal section...have something on your cat maybe?

Alannah: Hmmmm, will try to work that in some how...

Right, so I was reading Rhea's piece on 'Letting People Read Your Diary' in response to this whole blogging phenomenon, and began to mull over her thoughts on public disclosure on the web and whether or not this at times leads us to 'cross the line'. This reminded me of what Johannes was saying in class a couple of weeks back about two dominant streams of people interacting with the Internet, namely technology natives and technology immigrants. It would appear that personal web spaces are an extension of the techno-native's personality and that public disclosure of all things personal on the web is desirable, perhaps even 'natural'.

This leads me to reflect on my own background in applied linguistics and specifically to the linguist, Naomi Baron, who in my opinion is one of the most insightful commentators on computer-mediated communications. Her research is often quite prophetic and the following info. piece provides a few more of her predicted trends for CMC and emoticon usage in particular, Wipe that Smile off Your Face.

If you have time to check out Baron's work you'll see that not only is she analysing how peoples' communications are mediated via technology but she is providing a retrospective for trends in how we have communicated (in English) and the values we have assigned to different discourses i.e. written and spoken forms of language over the years.