Pronoun use in corporate blogs (1)
I’m currently working on a paper on pronominal use in corporate blogs and I thought it would make sense to blog a compressed version here.
Personal pronouns, specifically those of the first and second person, are characteristic for any kind of language use that can be described as ‘involved’, i.e. in which some sort of discourse situation between a speaker and one or more addressees exists. A frequent mistake is to assume that use of ‘I’ and ‘you’ necessarily makes a text ‘less formal’, more ‘personal’, or that, by contrast, texts in which the third person is preferred are more formal, ‘objective’, or serious.
But this is not quite accurate. Imagine that you want to tell your colleague that you’ve just spoken on the phone with a client. You might say something like “I just spoke to X and he canceled our meeting next week”. You could also use such an expression in an E-Mail, only that you might specify a time and date instead of writing that you “just” spoke to X. Or perhaps you’ll decide to speak of yourself as part of a team and write that “we” spoke to X. But in no plausible scenario would you refer to yourself in the third person, whether with a full noun (your name) or a third person pronoun (he/she). Such a behavior would not just be unusual or somewhat inappropriate - it would cause people to worry about your mental health in a serious way.
The same applies to the use of the second person. Imagine that you are having a conversation with Bob and he makes a suggestion that you don’t agree with. While you are facing and clearly addressing him, you say “Does Bob think that this is a good idea?”. It is very unlikely that any addressee would appreciate this kind of behavior. Or, imagine you are talking to Sue while Bob is also present and you consistently address her as “you” and him as “he”. Your behavior would be interpreted as impossibly rude and just by using the wrong pronoun you would be sending an extremely strong and unequivocally negative message.
In other words, when you are actively involved in a conversation you must use the pronoun of the second person, just as use of the first person pronoun to refer to yourself is the default.
Why is this important and what does it have to do with blogs?
While face-to-face communication has been around longer than man has been capable of using language, written communication is still a pretty recent innovation. As long as they were stored on paper and therefore costly to produce, the primary function of written texts was to archive information. Public records, historical documents, religious texts and learning materials all had the purpose of overcoming the key limitation of speech: that it is ephemeral, transient and inaccessible unless one happens to be in the right place at the right time.
Speech is shaped by the situation it takes place in. ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’ are all clear and unambiguous in their reference as long as all participants have access to the context to which all these words are anchored. Now think about the kinds of things written down in the abovementioned documents and it becomes clear that these are largely independent from a specific context. Why is that? Because the person who puts down something on paper assumes that it will be read by people unknown to him, possibly in a distant future. It simply makes no sense to refer to the reader as ‘you’, his location as ‘here’ and the time of writing as ‘now. And beyond that it is not plausible to refer to oneself a whole lot either, since the fate of one individual hardly seems relevant to the world at large when publishing in such an expensive medium. Diaries and personal letters obviously differ in that respect, the former genre being primarily concerned with the writer himself (therefore inevitably having an ‘I’) while the latter clearly addresses a specific person (and consequently has a ‘you’).
But what really stirred things up when it comes to interpreting writing as a form of communication was the Internet.
Firstly, the Net makes lightning fast, cheap and unlimited communication possible. Secondly, because hyperlinks allow people to causally connect one piece of writing with another, an expression and its context no longer exist in the kind of separation from one another that was characteristic for pre-digital writing.
Take this blog. The header states that it is written by “Cornelius Puschmann” and concerned with “corporate and institutional blogging, linguistics, open access and other things that interest him”. Since this post is published in Cornelius Puschmann’s blog you have every reason to believe that “I”, when used in a post, refers to me. If I refer to to a point in time called “now” you could further deduct that I’m talking about the time of writing and figure out when exactly that was by looking at the post’s time stamp.
In other words, a blog provides some of the context that is accessible in a conversation and that was previously not accessible in written texts. For that reason, some of the linguistic strategies of spoken language are used: bloggers refer to themselves via the first person pronoun and to their reader via the second person.
But now comes the decisive part. Self-reference is not just plausible because bloggers like to write about themselves, but also because it is an essential part of any ordinary conversation. Think about the last time you had a chat with anyone that went on for more than a few moments and you’ll find with almost complete certainty that your referred to yourself at some point.
Now think about advertising. Think about brochures, instruction manuals, news, or about your average company website. These text types generally don’t have self-reference because arguably they are not about the writer but concerned with third parties (newspaper articles, history book, encyclopedias). But in those genres where ‘you’ is addressed all the time (ads, corporate websites and many others) we encounter a paradox: someone is talking to us but we have no clue who it is, because there is no self-reference. Someone wants me to buy something, but I can’t say who it is.
Blogs solve this problem by mandating a speaker. Any blogging software or platform requires at least one user and his name is credited each time he publishes something. Blogs are customized by their owners and reflect the likes and dislikes of the blogger. Without a blogger, no blog.
Human beings are highly sensitive to relevant social-contextual information and when that information is withheld it seems implausible and fake to us. But exactly this is an everyday practice in advertising: addressing the reader/listener/viewer is common practice, even when there is nobody there who could plausibly be addressing him.
(Part 2 will follow soon)
