The Web is designed as a means of communication. Whether it is listening to a song on Pandora, watching a video on YouTube, or the more traditional interpersonal communication of a social network — the universal truths of society hold, we want a platform where we express ourselves and we want others to be able to understand.

Sociolinguists study just this. While they usually restrain their work to terrestrial communication, much of the science behind it can easily be extended into the world of bytes and bits. Lets take a look at some common terms in Sociolinguistics and see how they can help us better understand some common internet archetypes.

Troll

Favorite Beverage: Mountain Dew

The internet is his soapbox, and he loves nothing more than to prove that to you. If you write a post, you’re obviously wrong. If you comment on his work, he’ll tear into you for every comma splice or logical fallacy. He lives and breaths the flame war, and just wishes that he didn’t get that bad carpel tunnel every time he typed more than a three page polemic on why Deep Space Nine was vastly superior to Voyager. He’s smart, crafty and knows just how to turn a perfectly functional internet community into a snarling, yapping pile of waste.

Most of his favorite phrases include painful to read acronyms interspersed amongst grammatical unarguable, but excruciatingly pompous prose. He feeds on the pain of others, and wants nothing more than to shape the internet in his own image. The Troll is most commonly found stalking the halls of forums; usually, Forums on topics like Microsoft/Apple or any video game console. He is the first person to drop the phrase, “Macbook Sucks” and the skitter off to parts unknown to kindle another fire.

For the Sociolinguistic, the Troll is a perfect example of Diglossia.

Diglossia: In a bilingual nation when two languages are employed dependent on social situation.

Some common examples of this in the real world: French and Kyeyol in Haiti; Bokmål and Nynorsk in Norway or Katharevousa and Dhimotiki in Greece. Generally, the first language is considered the higher prestige language and is employed in formal texts. The second language is more colloquial and is considered to be of lower prestige.

If you haven’t caught the connection yet to the online world, lets take a look at two versions of this conversation. Billy the Troll has just finished playing Unreal Tournament and is looking to start a fight on the Forums, but first he wants to tell his Dad about it as a part of his parole.

Billy to his Dad: “Yea, I was playing Unreal and I beat everyone pretty badly.”

Billy to Tony: “Yea, man I t0t4lly pwned you n00bies. LOL!”

SEO Expert

Favorite Beverage: Grande Double Latte, hold the foam.

The master of convincing otherwise rational people that Search Engine Optimization is the hope, the truth and the light of internet communication. He posts long, rambling tirades about fool proof methods of increasing your traffic, and sells piles of eBooks and videos to help you do it. The SEO expert plays off of the age old “Get Rich Quick” mentality. Most of the successful writers in this field got where they are not because of their tips, but because they were able to sell the promise of getting rich effectively.

The SEO expert often has between 5 and 10 sub-blogs, each with very little truly relevant content but with the sort of niche presence and keyword stuffing that has pushed it far enough up the SERP to generate some pretty decent ad revenue. In a perfect world, the SEO expert would just develop a script to write half-way coherent prose and post it to the web every 30 minutes or so. Since this doesn’t tend to work, they fall back on pulling RSS feeds from across the web to fuel their chimeras.

The SEO Expert can post commonly be found prowling the dark corners of blog comments, looking for any opportunity to drop a link back to their site where Akismet can’t get to it.

The tool of choice for the SEO Expert is the honorific.

Honorifics: Markers that signal respect for the person you are speaking to.

In this example, the SEO Expert is trying to convince an otherwise rational person that a $20 eBook is all they need to understand how to use Squidoo to make them “thousands of dollars of residual income.”

Without honorifics: “Dude, buy my book it will make you rich.”

With honorifics: “Well sir, if you look at my record you will find that when gentlemen like yourself finish my book they often see startling increases in their monthly ad income.”

Comentathore

Favorite Beverage: Tea

Their comments are often longer than the posts they are writing about. They love to comment on others blogs, and draw nothing but joy from participating in the conversation. No strong blog community can exist without a few of these among its regular readers. They tend to read for substance, looking for just the right line to launch into a discussion, and they are always keeping up to date so that each comment is a work of art.

Since they often don’t write themselves, these webizens see comments as a quick and easy way to get an audience for their thoughts. They are on a first name basis with every blogger that you know, and probably read more posts to their completion than any other archetype. Unlike a Troll, irritating a comentathore won’t often lead to an explosive disagreement, but since they know your material just as well as you do, you better be ready to defend your mistake until time ends and the world grows cool. They can be your best friends, or your worst enemies and can be found anywhere their are five or more comments.

Comentathore’s spend so much time in your community that they quite often develop speech communities.

Speech community: Group of people who speak a common dialect.

An example of this is the commonly shared vernacular oft quoted in Slashdot including references to Nathalie Portman and other memes like “Stephen King is dead.”

B-Lister

Favorite Beverage: Nothing (more time to write)

Not quite a part of the A-list, but they work as if they will be. These are the community builders and content providers of the new age. When you read their blogs, you are almost always left wishing they could write more. These are the part-time bloggers, with enough style and panache to make it big. Every post shows something other than the typical rehashing of old content. They have the greatest understanding of the web of any of the other archetypes. They write from experience and even when they are saying something that you may have seen before they do so with just enough flare that it seems like you’ve seen it for the first time.

B-Listers talk the talk, walk the walk but just lack the traffic to really show off their abilities. You will most often find B-Listers sitting around writing sterling prose for their own short list of blogs or crafting replies to every comment or email that makes its way across their field of view.

Always afraid of insulting any A-lister than might show even vague interest in them, B-Listers tend to employ hedges more often than any other archetype.

Hedges: Soften the impact of speech. Some common hedges include: “sort of”, “kind of” and “like”.

If you want to see some excellent examples and counter-examples of hedges in action take a look at Techmeme on any Saturday afternoon.

Feed Fiend

VideoJug: How To Use RSS Feeds

Favorite Beverage: V8 (it’s good for the eyes)

RSS is their one true friend. Instead of wasting the time actually visiting their favorite sites, the Feed Fiend simply adds it to their RSS. Hundreds, if not thousands of these feeds have been added,clogging their virtual universe and reducing the number of them they also read to almost zero. While the Feed Fiend is rarely ever really connected to your community, they are also the most likely to read all of your stories as they go live. With a thousand and one posts to read on an hourly basis they are also the most likely to forget where they actually got their information from.

The Feed Fiend will most commonly be found lurking around Technorati’s Top 100, Bloglines, Google Reader or any other site that will help them mediate information overload.

Having been exposed to dozens of different blogs and dozens of different communities, Feed Fiends are likely candidates for linguistic Style Shifting.

Style Shifting: Altering the mode of speech depending on who we are talking to (pronunciation, syntax or vocabulary).

A Feed Fiend may communicate entirely differently on John Chows blog than he does on Techcrunch.

Web 2.0 Round

I thought I’d leave you with some other interesting tidbits about Sociolinguistics. While not strictly tech related, they should leave you thinking.

• Women tend to use more hedges and honorifics than men.
• Men tend to use more “talking” time than women do (experiment by Marjorie Swacker).
• The Criteron of Mutual Intelligibility is used to determine whether two dialects are of the same language; If speakers can converse fluently between dialects then they must be of the same language.
• A certain use of contractions is necessary to avoid stilted speech (efficiency of verbal gestures). This is an experiment in note based articles. We have found it is easier for some people to absorb all the information if placed outside of any formal frame, much like an encyclopedia or reference.

[Be sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed before leaving]