Two stories in Wired News A Matter of (Wired News) Style and It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now are about the style guidelines of Wired and changes. Tom Long, the author of both and the Wired News’ copy chief, set standards that have an effect. That the internet and web are now lower case says something about their perception as generic rather than named entities. The e-mail article, however, is more interesting, because Tony talks about the shift in style as the web became commercial, main stream and then dropped. Style reflects attitude and community. This is courtesy of StÈfan Sinclair.
Bibliographic References:
Long, Tony, “It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now”, Wired News, Aug. 16, 2004, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html
Long, Tony, “A Matter of (Wired News) Style, Wired News, Oct. 23, 2000, http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39450,00.html
An extended quote that captures Long’s view of the place of Wired and its style,
When it first appeared in 1996, Wired News was an online adjunct of Wired magazine, which saw itself as a herald of the coming digital age. It existed — and exists — to proclaim the ultimate triumph of technology, especially Internet-related technology. While the magazine delighted in chronicling the cultural and intellectual implications of the next “killer app,” Wired News existed on a more temporal plane, providing nuts-and-bolts coverage of business and technology news.
The mid-decade was high tide for the geeks, wonks and assorted journalistic gearheads who sat at the feet of their guru, Wired Digital founder Louis Rossetto, as he told them they were the vanguard of the revolution.
Part of that revolution would involve the evolution of the language. The jargon of the engineer and the programmer would become the hard currency of everyday English, Rossetto said, and they believed.
…
But one day, the digital revolution was over. The big media companies wrested control of the Internet from the kids in the horned-rimmed glasses. It was time to grow up. Even the magazine and website parted company: Wired joined the CondÈ Nast stable, and Wired News was sold to Lycos.
Meanwhile, the digerati retreated in the face of a relentless assault by e-commerce (or else embraced it themselves). The multitudes had arrived — to surf, to shop, to inflict their bourgeois tastes on the newest of the new media, much as they had done with television decades earlier.
The Internet landscape as it exists in 2000 is a far different place than it was in 1996. It is mainstream, and growing more so every day. And while people still can’t spell or punctuate correctly when they dash off an e-mail (or anything else, for that matter), no editor worth the name can justify looking on benignly while the English language is butchered in the name of some tin-pot revolution, regardless of its narcotic effect at the time.
Standards do matter. The principles of good English are always relevant.
I have the feeling Tony Long doesn’t beleive in the breathless rhetoric of Wired. Rather than “herald” the coming age he calls it a “tin-pot revolution” with a narcotic effect (on his colleagues). So what follows virtual revolutions?
Comments are closed.