OVERVIEW

This chapter looks at the impact of some of the technological innovations on the communicative practices of professional communities and genres, in the light of the new developments in the age of globalisation and the growing expansion of English, from a socio-economic and sociolinguistic perspective (Blommaert 2010) as well as a technological one, with reference to examples drawn from the professional domains examined in the previous chapters (thus medicine, law and education), also with the aim of showing some of their stylistic features.

LANGUAGE AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

There can be no doubt that the new affordances provided by the technological revolution are extremely pervasive and transforming the styles and stylistics of communication online. These affordances enable vast quantities of information to be generated and distributed extremely rapidly in a multitude of ways to very large numbers of users. Some of these changes have been well documented (see, for example, Crystal's extensive work on Internet language – e.g. Crystal 2006, 2011 – or, more specifically, Boardman 2005 on websites, Myers 2010 on blogs and wikis, Tagg 2012 on text messaging, Seargeant and Tagg 2014 on social media). However, since the new affordances are currently so omnipresent, it is easy to forget how recent they are: Internet did not exist before the 1990s, nor email until the mid 1990s. Google first appeared in 1999, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Text messaging and instant messaging on mobile phones were only developed in the early 2000s and blogging did not become widespread until about the same time (Crystal 2013). Because of the rapidly evolving nature of the technologies and their use, some of the references here are to talks describing and interpreting the developments, which were very recent at the time of writing (e.g. Crystal 2013, Myers 2014).

In any case, it is clear that the new technologies are highly innovative and are making a major impact on the discourses of professional communities, and that the technological innovations and affordances underpinning the development of software have, in their turn, a direct, often rapid, impact on the evolution of Internet genres (Miller and Shepherd 2009). Nevertheless, it would also seem that the situation is both dynamic and volatile; for example, the new affordances proliferate rapidly and can be generically unstable (Myers 2010).