Читать книгу Next: A Vision of Our Lives in the Future - Marian Salzman - Страница 20

For those who have become ‘plugged in’, the Internet offers a world of new people, new ideas and new information. It opens up avenues of communication that allow us access to places we otherwise might never have gone. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the Net also will alter the path that trends take around the world. Today, online communication is taking place primarily in English (an estimated three-quarters of all Internet sites are located in English-speaking countries.) As the Internet attracts a more global audience, however, there is a mounting effort to broaden the appeal and usefulness of the Net by taking down the ‘English only’ signs, thereby enabling and encouraging people to communicate and collaborate in their native languages.

The number of multilingual Websites is growing. The Internet Society and Montreal-based Alis Technologies have established Babel (http://babel.alis.com:8080/), a site aimed at internationalizing the Web by promoting the use of languages other than English. Babel will eventually be available in approximately ten languages. Dynalab (http: www.dynalab.com.), a Taiwanese font manufacturer, is marketing GlobalSurf, a utility that provides fonts in twenty-three languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew and most European languages. The product solves the common problem of garbled type resulting from double-byte Asian characters by using fonts that support Unicode. Web pages can now correctly display these foreign language characters on any browser that supports Unicode.

As the online population gradually falls more closely in line with global realities, we can be sure that cross-cultural influences will no longer emanate primarily from Western trend capitals. In the past few years, the online community has evolved beyond ‘technogeeks’ to encompass the thought and opinion leaders who – with close, smart tracking – can serve as important barometers of how, when and whether particular fads, trends and styles will evolve from the ‘mindspace’ of the Internet to the ‘marketplace’ of the face2face world. It’s these pioneers of next who will reshape the world of marketing communications and commerce for the future.

Cybercommunication

In watching the evolution of communication online, it’s been interesting to note how cybernauts have resolved the problem of the lack of body language in this medium. As any Internet user can tell you, an entire code has been developed to convey the human emotions that one cannot see in cyberspace. These typed symbols – most commonly called emoticons or smileys – give a degree of life and individuality to online expression.

To view a Western smiley, tilt your head to the left. Among the most common examples:

	Basic smiley (shows humour/happiness)
	A wink (shows you’re being a flirt or sarcastic)
	A frown (means you’re sad, depressed, or have hurt feelings)
	Crying
	Laughter, or a really big grin
	A kiss
	Sticking out your tongue
	’My lips are sealed.’
	Astonished

In contrast, here’s a sampling of Japanese kao maaku (face marks) which are meant to be viewed straight on:

	Happy face
	Weeping face
	Banzai smiley (arms raised in a traditional cheer)
	Excited face
	Cold sweat
	‘I’m sorry’

The Internet is also creating its very own language, one that steals from everyone, from stenographers to street kids. Many of us have become adept at the standard abbreviations of the Net: using BTW instead of writing out ‘by the way’; IMHO, for ‘in my humble opinion’; POV instead of ‘point of view.’ We’ve also usurped shorthand made popular by urban black youth in the US: dis as a stand-in for ‘disrespect’; 24/7 to mean twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week’. As Europeans and Asians establish more of a presence in Internet chatrooms and newsgroups, we suspect Euro and Asian slang will infiltrate commonly used cyberlingo. At the same time, we’ll be seeing cyberlingo begin to infiltrate language offline. Already, our former Dutch colleagues are using BTW and ITRW (short for ‘in the real world’) in everyday conversation. And just as African-American slang has pervaded American language in the 1990s (courtesy of rap music), geek-speak has pervaded the jargon of business life in the US.