Most people who bother at all would probably admit that the English of the worldwide web — verbose, rambling and ill-tempered — is not really the kind they want to read in a book or a newspaper. But it’s generally assumed that, because this is the web, we cannot do a thing about it. Our civilisation has been transformed by the internet in a way unprecedented since the time of Gutenberg and Caxton and the means of mass communication, so the argument runs, must adapt to the global language of 24/7. It follows that any struggle against the abuse and impoverishment of English in blogs and emails is a sentimental archaism. Underneath this belief lies the recognition that language is a natural gr-owth and not an instrument we can shape for or police for better self-expression.

Does any of this sound familiar? If you look up Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, you will find that I have simply adapted his opening paragraph — and his more general concerns about the language — for the internet. It’s interesting to do this because am-ong Orwell’s heirs, the writers and journalists of today, there’s anxiety about the quality of English prose in the lawless domains of cyberspace.

In 1946, Orwell said English was ‘in a bad way’. In 2007, quite a lot of people would probably concede a dismay at the overall crassness of contemporary ‘cyberprose’. But such is the nervousness and incomprehension about the internet revolution that no one is willing to articulate this. It’s also interesting to set Orwell’s celebrated call to arms next to the practices of the internet because, among the guardians of cyber culture, the author of 1984 remains a household god. The same people who trumpet the ‘democratic’ qualities of the internet would probably cite his essay approvingly in any discussion of English today.

After Orwell, English did not suddenly recover the clarity and simplicity of the King James Bible. Management-speak and sociological claptrap still flourished, but the infusion of vigorous Americanisms and vivid demotic usage helped to confound Orwell’s direst predictions. At the high end, the use of English by the young writers of the Fifties and Sixties such as Pinter, Roth, Spark, Updike and Burgess rescued the culture from the thing that Orwell most detested: ‘Lies, evasions, petty hatred and schizophrenia.’ By the Eighties, and the arrival of the Rushdie-Ishiguro generation, English had become a medium of almost limitless surprise, matched by an equally stupendous breakthrough in the means of mass communications. Global English now entered the phase, in Michael Lewis’s expression, of ‘the new new thing’. When laptops and the internet first appeared, the inky paraphernalia of typewriters, carbons and flimsy paper familiar to Orwell’s contemporaries was tossed into the dustbin of literary history.

Briefly, technological innovation was exhilarating. New ways of transmitting ideas, words and expressions came thick and fast. The Oxford English Dictionary went online, quickening the pace of linguistic innovation. The first time I used ‘weblog’, in a magazine story about Arnold Schwarzenegger in September 2003, the meaning of this exotic term had to be placed in square brackets. Six months later, ‘blogging’ was common. By 2005, some 60 new blogs were being launched every minute.

Now just in its second decade, the blogosphere is at once wonderful and horrible.

For the global community, fumbling towards some common ground, the opportunity it affords for extraordinary cross-cultural interaction is liberating and unprecedented. The Baghdad Blogger is just one example of the blogosphere at its finest. For everyone to have a voice, in the most unpropitious circumstances, is the fulfilment of a dream.

Yet the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing.

So where does this leave English prose? Journalists used to justify the ephemeral nature of their work by claiming, defensively, that newspapers provided ‘the first draft of history’. Such justifications have been made meaningless by the web. Now, if your version doesn’t have a presence in the rolling news of 24/7, it simply does not exist. However, the form in which is does exist should give us pause. Spontaneity is a virtue, but so is mature reflection.

There’s another thing that Orwell the great freelance would have been quick to identify: in the blogosphere, no one gets properly paid; its irresponsibility is proportionate to its remoteness from the cash nexus. Worse, the blogosphere, to which all journalists are now professionally committed, not only challenges the old infrastructure of print, but it also sponsors a new prolixity. From the Orwellian point of view, it is the violence the internet does to the English language as much as its challenge to the journalistic infrastructure that is the biggest anxiety. — The Guardian