From Statistical Panic to Moral Panic: The Metadiscursive Construction and Popular Exaggeration of New Media Language in the Print Media

Abstract

As a way of tracking popular framing of CMC, this article critically reviews an international corpus of 101 print-media accounts (from 2001 to 2005) of language-use in technologies such as instant messaging and text messaging. From the combined perspective of folk linguistics and critical discourse analysis, this type of metadiscourse (i.e., discourse about discourse) reveals the conceptual and ideological assumptions by which particular communication practices come to be institutionalized and understood. The article is illustrated with multiple examples from across the corpus in order to demonstrate the most recurrent metadiscursive themes in mediatized depictions of technologically or computer-mediated discourse (CMD). Rooted in extravagant characterizations of the prevalence and impact of CMD, together with highly caricatured exemplifications of actual practice, these popular but influential (mis)representations typically exaggerate the difference between CMD and nonmediated discourse, misconstrue the “evolutionary” trajectory of language change, and belie the cultural embeddedness of CMD.