E-commerce lexicon: communicating in brief

E-COMMERCE LEXICON: COMMUNICATING IN BRIEF

Conference paper for the Style Council Conference, Brisbane, November 2002.

Joanne Jacobs

Brisbane Graduate School of Business

Queensland University of Technology

The development of an e-commerce lexicon has been posited as a revolution in style. In a business environment where time is money, information is power and transactions are risky, there has developed a lexicon which is characterised by efficiency of language, abbreviation, and even an entirely new literacy among the technological elite.

There are some who argue that the internet is no different from any other communication space. The academic, Michael Porter, has said that “for all its power, the internet does not represent a break from the past; rather, it is the latest stage in the ongoing evolution of information technology” (2001: 74). But while business transactions per se may not have changed, the manner of communicating those transactions has changed dramatically, and continues to change at an extraordinary pace.

If there is a genuine e-commerce lexicon, then it has grown from a revolution in business, both for vendors and consumers alike. There have been changes to consumer expectations on the basis of internet enabled technologies. Time pressures, user empowerment and mass customisation made possible through the unique features of the internet – time and geographical independence, database integration and user profiling - has meant that all parties in e-commerce transactions have an expectation of getting and making more for less investment in financial terms as well as time and other investments.

This change has also taken place within the framework of technologies that, for all their advancement, still limit the format of communication. Cook (2002) has noted that “if human behaviour were computer programs, human language would be the killer app”. Making oneself understood in an e-commerce transaction requires use of a digital language in a manner that is not adequately addressed by either written or verbal precedents. Anthropologists and linguists have already noted that the style of e-communication adopted in a digital space is one which carries traces of spokenness and writtenness but which goes beyond that nexis of verbal and digital communications and virtually invents itself as we engage with the technologies. Of course, this not only makes the creation of a style manual for e-commerce communications difficult, it also makes those of us experimenting in these technologies look a little amateurish. Richards (1998) has said that “our technological capability has outpaced our social capability. This makes us look like social incompetents in charge of increasingly under-utilised knowledge”. But it is this process of defining knowledge which is central to this process.

Given that mass adoption of the internet has occurred at the time of commercial occupation of the internet, it pays to look briefly at the forces operating on the development of this manner of communication. To do that, it’s useful to consider how knowledge and information are regarded in light of digital technologies. We are often told we are living in an information age. Commentators from Nicholas Negroponte and Howard Rheingold through to Robert McChesney and Neil Postman have all argued over the rise of information as a currency in and of itself. But the discipline of economics distinguishes between information and knowledge very deliberately. Information, it is argued is a flow concept – mere data in a system, and the internet is a receptacle for an extraordinary level of information, to the point of information overload. As a result, the value of information is reduced. Knowledge, economic argues, is a stock concept –something that is value added and can be stored and used on a regular basis but which shouldn’t be regarded as something you archive. Rather, it is constantly in the system, being updated and augmented through communication exchanges. Knowledge is drawn from information, but only after information has been value-added – made appropriate for a particular exchange.

This economics-oriented theory has driven technologists to creation of information extraction programs in order to turn mere information into value-added knowledge. Kushmerick (2000) has described IE as “the task of identifying the specific fragments of a single document that constitute its core semantic content”. In an effort to make exchanges more efficient, this reduction of documentation from its verbose and complete form, into the key elements needed for the exchange to take place has influenced the nature and form of digital communication.

The result of this reduction of language is the development of a simplistic and somewhat naïve sense of getting more for less, and having more time and capacity for further exchanges. Of course the problem with this kind of abbreviated communication is that it inevitably produces a less sophisticated lexicon for communication, and encourages individuals in a communication exchange to produce messages and writing and send those messages without reflection in the manner of a written communication, and without the social and non-verbal cues we have in face-to-face or voice communications. This in itself is problematic because meaning can be so easily misinterpreted.

In order to overcome the problems with misinterpretation chat communities and email exchanges adopted the iconic language of emoticons to indicate emotional responses to communication exchanges. While these emoticons were initially regarded as a feature of informal, chat-oriented communications, business exchanges have adopted emoticons in business-to-business transactions at least. As Levine et al (2000) have noted in their basic text for the future of business, the Cluetrain Manifesto, the end of business as usual is a product of the end of formal business transactions, and the rise of business conversations mediated by networked technologies. And these informal conversations need all the visual cues of chat as a basis for ensuring client and consumer comfort with e-commerce transactions.

Bruce (1997) in his analysis of literacy technologies has argued that virtual reality is indeed the most advanced form of literacy in that it combines so many extant styles of formatting content. As linguists and style manual creators, you may wel argue with that point but the fact remains that the e-commerce lexicon has grown from an advanced e-communication system and series of protocols. It is not as chaotic as many commentators would have you believe. Indeed, it is probably one of the most complex systems of framing communication yet invented. Crystal (2002) in his research on Language and the Internet has noted that email is a particularly unusual communication in that receivers can excerpt segments of the sender’s message and choose to respond very particularly to information they have extracted as requiring a response. The very practice of selective responses, snipping text and contextualising communication is something never before experienced in human communication. But the same framing of information is not so possible with alternative means of digital communication and ultimately, email is not the only form of e-commerce communication, and is thus not the only lexicon.

This leads us onto considering the range of lexicons in existence.

• 
  Business – generally operating with email, some chat and direct document transfer. Tends to be the most formal of lexicons but also the most efficient for closing a deal
  
• 
  Chat, etc – primarily the product of social cybercommunities but increasingly being used to discuss business matters even among socially oriented groups.
  
• 
  Blog – the newest of forums for communication, and the most recently accepted phenomenon in the e-commerce lexicon (as a result of journalist, William Safire’s use of the word in an article in the New York Times).
  

Each of these forums have varying protocols, but they all contribute to the overall elements of the e-commerce lexicon because each is being employed for e-commerce transactions and exchanges.

The phenomenon of blogging in and of itself is one of the most advanced forms of consumer-consumer marketing in existence. While it is primarily the activity of people who are driven to share their experiences with strangers, the nature of the communities is that you have to be invited by a friend to participate, or else pay to get in. Thus it is a self-selecting community who probably already bring their own lexicon to communication exchanges.

It is imperative at this point that I at least mention LEET SPEAK. Adopted widely by the technological elite, this language was initially thought to have evolved when the internet was adopted by technologically inferior beings who did not understand programming languages. But it has evolved over time and leet speak generators now exist on the WWW as a means of assisting the uninitiated in understanding the concepts being discussed by these digital nomads. In terms of its implications for an e-commerce lexicon, the novelty value of leet speak may seem arbitrary and selective, but the adoption of expressions central to the digital elite and propagated through leet speak could well influence an e-commerce lexicon over time. The repetition of ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US (a poor translation to English of a statement in a Japanese game widely used by leet speakers) among the digerati has already placed the phrase in the annals of leet history. It is even beginning to seep into popular parlance among the technologically adept sectors of the e-commerce community. These mass trends in digital communication need to be watched carefully for their influence over an e-commerce lexicon at large.

The nature of an e-commerce lexicon is that it is constantly evolving. For linguists and style manual editors, this poses the problem of setting standards that will inevitably fall out of date in a very short period. However, there are possibilities that can emerge from such a problem. As the lexicon evolves, the technology itself can be used to dictate style. For e-commerce transactions, the drive for efficiency of communication techniques will eventually be stalled by the recognition that relationship management and emotional and communicative systems are desirable entities in an exchange, and that there is stock value in support systems and pseudo-business conversations. As terminology shifts and the lexicon broadens, electronic media will not replace print media, but will become a reference resource for discussing publications, and making sense of traditional print.

References

Bruce, B. C. (1997) ‘Literacy technologies: What stance should we take?’, Journal of Literacy Research, 29 (2) pp 289-309

Cook, F. (2002) ‘Linguists see ‘Digital Language’ as Cultural Catalyst’, ExpertEditor.com, http://www.experteditor.com/netlingo.htm

Crystal, D. (2002) Language and the Internet, London: Cambridge University Press

Kushmerick, N. (2000) ‘Gleaning the Web’, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 1999, pp 20-22

Levine, R., Locke, C., Searles, D., Weinberger, D. (2000) The Cluetrain Manifesto: The end of business as usual, Cambridge Massachussetts: Perseus Books

Porter, M. (2001) ‘Strategy and the Internet’, Harvard Business Review, March.

Richards, I. (1998) ‘Innovation: the strategic imperative’, The Knowledge Management Report Series, Lavendon: Management Trends International