Sociolinguistics and CMC

Sunday's NYT Magazine contained a piece about txt msgng by Charles McGrath. There are some interesting things in here, first off the neologism emoticonography, which is a new term to me and has about 240 Google hits. It appears in a MetaFilter post from October here, where the user says they "just made that word up;" it is the title of an article explaining communication on IRC; and way back in 1994, someone used it in an email posted to the American Dialect Society's listserv.

Next, there's the comparison of text messaging language to hip-hop usage:

As with any language, efficiency isn't everything. There's also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of "z" for "s," for example, "a," for "er" and "d" for "th." Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call "performative"; it's writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point.

There are a couple of things about making this comparison to hip-hop: hip-hop isn't written as much as it's spoken, and when it's written (in liner notes, for instance?) it's written to imitate speech. But there's no constraint on space or time like there is in texting, and it seems that a lot of the stylistic things also have to do with these constraints, like "a" for "er" and "d" for "th," both of which minimize characters. I'm also unclear about this explanation of performativity as writing wanting to be speech; "showing off" being "part of the point" actually seems more on target, though in terms of what it does for you socially, not in terms of just "performing."

I really didn't know emoticons were being used this much, especially in text messaging as opposed to IM, IRC, chat, or BBS. Apparently there's even an emoticon for Hitler: ( /.#( ) I also haven't heard the terms "lateral" and "penetrative" used (the author claims that txtng is the former, according to scholars); is this a communication concept?

Perhaps the most interesting part is the discussion about the suitability of different languages to text messaging:

The Chinese language is particularly well-suited to the telephone keypad, because in Mandarin the names of the numbers are also close to the sounds of certain words; to say "I love you," for example, all you have to do is press 520. (For "drop dead," it's 748.)

I'd like to know more about this; does anyone know of any studies? Surely they're out there.

Finally, the article concludes with a morality tale, stemming from the fact that text messages are used primarily for "greasing the social wheels" functions, a way of reiterating that we have connections, be they electronic or real. He's probably right about that, but then he writes this:

"We're all wired together" is the collective message, and we'll signal again in a couple of minutes, not to say anything, probably, but just to make sure the lines are still working. The most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere and at any time, it turns out that we really don't have much we want to say.

This desperation seems to come out of nowhere, especially since earlier in the article he talks about how txt is used to flirt, ask on dates, break up, etc. But even if the whole point is just to grease the wheels, why would we be expected to "say something"? Is it different from Hi howareyou haveaniceday what'sup takecare?