Always On ─ Language in an Online and Mobile World

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electronic media has magnified the laid-back "whatever" attitude toward formal writing that young people everywhere have embraced, but it is not a cause of it. A more troubling trend, according to Baron, is the myriad ways in which we block incoming IMs, camouflage ourselves on Facebook, and use ring tones or caller ID to screen incoming calls on our mobile phones. Our ability to decide who to talk to, she argues, is likely to be among the most lasting influences that information technology has upon the ways we communicate with one another. Moreover, as more and more people are "always on" one technology or another--whether communicating, working, or just surfing the web or playing games--we have to ask what kind of people we are becoming, as individuals and as family members or friends, if the relationships we form must increasingly compete for our attention with digital media.

Naomi S. Baron is Professor of Linguistics at American University in Washington, DC. A leading authority on language use in the age of the computer, she has studied instant messaging, text messaging, mobile phone practices, multitasking behavior, and Facebook usage by American college students, along with cross-cultural mobile phone use. She is the author of six earlier books, including Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading. Baron has been interviewed in such media as Good Morning America, ABC News 20/20, CNN, the Diane Rehm Show, Fresh Air, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Wired Magazine.