“The Internet has done an incredible job of bringing the world together in the last few years,” writes Michael Kellogg, creator of the Word Reference online dictionary. “Of course, one of the greatest barriers has been language” (WordReference.com).
Language and communication exchange are both intimately related to control. They are also integral to new media culture and interfaces. Tara McPherson says the Web is the interface that mediates the relationship between humans and machines. Thanks to the shared language of binary code, humans and machines have become adept at communicating with each other. Now that this has happened, we have come full circle. Instead of using the interface to communicate with machines, humans use the interface to communicate with each other.
Word Reference is a site that demonstrates how modern technology controls human communication. When it comes to HHI, or human-to-human interactions, we increasingly rely on technology to bridge the language gaps that divide us. There are three important components of the site: the translator dictionary, the language forums, and the grammar demonstrations. The dictionary demonstrates Galloway’s invisible control protocol, and the forums McPherson’s volitional mobility. The grammar demonstrations, however, go beyond Galloway’s definition of protocol and demonstrate the new way we are using digital resources to find meaning.
Mr. Kellogg’s dictionaries translate words between five language combinations: English and Spanish, English and French, English and Italian, Spanish and French, and Spanish and Portuguese, making it much easier for speakers these five languages to communicate. But, this ease comes at a cost. Alexander Galloway describes modern society as a dance alternating between control and freedom. This description is exactly what Word Reference does. The site gives us the freedom to communicate across language barriers, but only within the bounds of a predetermined protocol.
Word Reference affords the user freedom within the set boundaries of “conventional rules that govern possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (Galloway 7). These rules are also known as protocol. What follows is an example of WR’s protocol.
A user asks for the Italian equivalent of the word “hello.” According to Word Reference, “ “salve,” “buongiorno,” “buonasera,” and “ciao” all mean “hello” in Italian. Answers are multiple, and, like the Internet itself, “noncentralized, nondominating, and nonhostile” (Galloway 29). However, these choices are complied from exclusively from a list of words already contained within the site’s database. We may feel free to choose, but we’re still on a leash. It just has a bit more slack than it used to.
Galloway illustrates how this type of non-threatening control works, especially in terms of meaning, by employing the example of DNA. “DNA is not simply a translation of language,” Galloway says, “it is language. It governs meaning by mandating that anything meaningful must register and appear somewhere in its system" (Galloway 50). The same thing is true of Word Reference. If the word a user is searching for is not included in the site's word bank, as far as Word Reference is concerned, that word does not exist. Thus, the user is forced to find another word with a similar meaning. However, the new word will not mean exactly the same thing as the original. In this way, Word Reference dictates meaning and communication between human beings.
Word Reference also has a language forum, a feature where users can post questions about language and other users can respond. In this venue, users are made to feel like they can influence meaning. Tara McPherson calls this simulated feeling of power and influence over Internet content “volitional mobility.” In reality, the user is operating within what Gilles Deleuze calls a control society that is moderated by external forces.
The forums also provide more evidence for our reliance on technology to mediate communication. The majority of the questions found on the forum ask how to foster and maintain relationships despite a language barrier. Tellingly, the thread with the subject line “I love you” is the most frequented one in the Italian-English forum. It has been viewed 33,919 times.
At the end of his piece on protocol, Galloway argues that protocol is against meaning. He claims that protocol does not engage in interpretation of data, just delivery. Word Reference does function like Galloway’s protocol in that it delivers data. However, WR also offers multiple meanings and the corresponding grammatical contexts for translated words. In this way, Word Reference goes beyond the first definition of protocol. For Galloway, the machine is a servant that fetches information for the user. But in the context of Word Reference, the machine is also the master, providing the proper context for the word and its corresponding grammatical rules.
Word Reference is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous. The site now offers a toolbar feature for your Internet browser, and version of the dictionary for mobile devices like Trios and Blackberries. As the world population continues to grow, human languages become more and more proliferate and diverse (a phenomenon that inspired Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash). At the same time, technology is becoming an increasingly present fixture in our daily lives. In the future, complete dependence on a digital interface to communicate person-to-person is not as outlandish as it may initially seem.
Works Cited
“About WordReference.com.” Word Reference Online Dictionary. 2007. 16 March 2008.
Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
McPherson, Tara. “Reload Liveness, Mobility, and the Web.” New Media, Old Media: A History And Theory Reader. Wendy Hui Kim Chun and Thomas Keenan, eds. Cambridge: Routledge, 2006.
