In the first instance my task within each research frame was to examine what each particular methodology could capture and describe within the talk-text as data. Only then could I begin to detect directions within these accumulating sets of features, and so to hypothesise that on-line chat had recurrent or characteristic behaviours and selective techniques, which, while varying across the types of chat sites examined, tended towards the establishment of recognizable “on-line chat” linguistic strategies. By summarizing the most explicit findings in each study, I can now move to compare the seven studies, adding where appropriate observations from five supplementary chatroom studies[1], to show features common to all text-based chat, and generalisable as the “core” discursive modes of Internet chat.
Despite their often
incommensurable focus, the range of the theoretical methods used for analysis
revealed particular communication features common to all chatrooms. Most of
these features are not part of person-to-person off-line talk, and many appear
unique to text-based electronic dialogue - although there is evidence that some
of these behaviours occur in related
Returning to the five
assumptions, drawn from the
·
That language used in chat rooms
is more deliberate and calculated than the predominantly “informal” styles
might suggest.
·
That conversation within
Chatrooms demands a highly sensitized “reading” of texted-talk gambits from participants.
·
That “chat” does not differ from
natural conversation in certain key aspects, but does so in others.
·
That observational study of
chatroom conversation can capture adaptations to conversational behaviours.
·
That such work gives a better understanding of how, and why,
chatrooms are an important area in which to extend current conversational
research theory.
Each case study had three components useful in bringing about such conclusions for chatroom analysis.
Firstly, the linguistic theory and its associated methodology identified key aspects relating to how each text-based set of chat data “worked”.
Secondly, each case study identified features of conversation that were unique to both text-based chatrooms, and to the varying types and functions of such spaces.
Thirdly each case study allowed for the analysis of recurring or “typical” chatroom behaviours, demonstrating elements of communicative activity specific to the theory driving that particular case study. In other words, both general and specialised features were pursued in each case study.
The primary discoveries in each case study together provided a map of IRC, in both general and specific terms, across a broad spectrum of exemplar behaviours, at least during the sample period, and most likely beyond.
Case Study One based its analysis on Reader-response theory
to show that in on-line chat, both the person writing and the one (or many)
reading are co-language-meaning creators. Chatrooms were revealed as an active
reading environment where the “reader is left with everything to do…” (Sartre,
1949, p. 176). In order to engage in
conversation the “speaker-writer” first needs to be a “listener-reader”. Yet,
as with all Reader-Response research, chat-texts captured for this study
illustrated ongoing tensions for users, in relation to the issue of “closure”,
or certainty in interpretation. What is left open in chatrooms – more so than
in person-to-person conversation - is what later Reader-Response commentators
called “preferred readings”: techniques whereby texts are arranged to position
readers to receive and interpret them in certain ways which optimize selected
understandings and suppress others. Such
texts may construct within themselves “an inscribed reader”, or such a figure
and its attendant roles may emerge in “interpretative communities” (
Using Reader-Response theory to examine chat in a community of users checking progress of an extreme weather-alert emergency, I found that there are two moments of “reading” that a chat participant carries out in seeking to understand meaning within a chatroom, even before beginning to read the actual utterances of the other chatters. In person-to-person conversation early “readings” of an interlocutor, taken even before we listen to what he or she says, involve viewing the person, their appearance, their posture, body language and the environment (see Richmond and McCroskey, 1995; Ong, 1993; Goffman, 1981). Similar work is clearly undertaken in on-line chat.
In chatrooms, firstly, the
title of the chatroom is read. Case Study One showed that chatters carried on
conversations reflective of the chatroom title, Hurricane Floyd. In other Case
Studies with clearly designated topic-related titles I found the same reading
techniques used. Speakers tended to
converse about the topic established by the chatroom title. In chatrooms the
reader’s response fits the chatroom milieu.
A new utterance may begin a new thread, but there too the response is
dependent on the reading. For example in Case Study One turn 107,
<SWMPTHNG> inquires <YOU AINT TALKING ABOUT MEX ROOFERS
|
Thread |
Example |
Number of turns in thread |
|
Storm thread |
Turn4 <TIFFTIFF18> DO U MOW IF ITS
GONNA HIE |
254 |
|
Mexican thread |
Turn77 <SWMPTHNG> THERE'LL BE PLENTY
OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N CAROLINA |
14 |
|
Personal thread |
Turn189 <guest-Beau> Calvin, your last name wouldn't be Graham would it |
7 |
|
Chocolate thread |
Turn15 <mahmoo> brb.......gotta go get me some chocolate |
6 |
|
Other |
Turn215 <guest-Capt> VIAGRA |
6 |
Reader-response theory takes us further however than just the recognition that topic controls most of the dominant conversational thread-construction. Here, I found that the “writerly-writer” or actively constructing text-talker who initiates a conversational thread, and the “writerly-reader” who responds, are able to move the chat into new avenues, not simply responding in topic-compliant ways to developing conversations, but demonstrating especially “open” and “active” strategies of initiating text and responding to it. The talk remains topic centred, yet works to focus and refocus threads around certain aspects or themes of a topic. This is not just information provision, but creative exchange build around information sharing.
Chat entrants anticipate certain content and behaviours, focused around the chatroom title – but also display tendencies towards adapting rapidly as topic focus shifts and new threads develop, and even a capacity to shift off topic, especially into personalized referential chat. One of the features of reader-response theory as I am using it in chatrooms is thus that it shows how a reader brings certain assumptions to a text, based on the interpretive strategies he/she has brought to a particular community, from other social-cultural contexts (see Gass, Neu, and Joyce, 1995; Blum-Kulka, Kasper, Gabriele, 1989; Rheingold, 1994; Turkle, 1995). The racial tone in Case Study One, displayed toward Mexican roofers, is an example of this. Reader-Response analysis thus reveals inside chat the sort of active, meaning-generating participants considered central in postmodern consumer culture (Lury, 1996; Castells, 1997, 2000). Even where the topic-shifts and socio-cultural attitudes may be directed to conservative or reactionary positions, the claims on reflexive use of communicative technologies and transformational interventions on communicative texts demonstrate Castells’ hypothesis, that the new communicative technologies are necessary to the “project identity” strategies of the postmodern condition. IRC becomes not a trivial pastime, but a key location for social and cultural formation.
How important is the particular chatroom context for the reader-writer interpretive relation?
It is the title of the
chatroom that I suggest lures a participant to a particular chatroom. In Case
Study One it was the topic of Hurricane Floyd. In Case Study Seven it is
baseball and in Case Study Three the title of the chatroom indicates that chat
will focus around the pop idol Britney Spears – although in this case, as the
analysis suggests, talk focused more into a Britney Spears form of style
culture than into direct discussion of the ostensible topic. It appears then that despite the title as
indicator, the chatter has to deal with multiple frames of interpretation,
assessing the motivations and attitudes of others in the room. When in turn 105 of Case Study One
<SWMPTHNG> asks <YOU AINT TALKING ABOUT MEX ROOFERS
The chatroom as context appears then to pre-position its users to expect and enact certain behaviours, values and topics. But since this appears to be only partially established through the title and topic selections, chatters also display complex techniques for both signalling and reading back rather less directly expressed aspects of the social and cultural framings brought to the chat. Context is generated in both chat space and real space – and these may or may not align. To this extent it becomes necessary to assess the contribution of the technologisation of chat to its cultural contextual framings, and to take up the findings of Case Study 2.
Case Study Two examines
on-line chat as a form of Computer-Mediated Communication (
The many tools available for
To some extent the impacts of
Synchronous
Three terms, “gap”, “lapse”
and “pause” are used to refer to silences in CA[2]. In chatrooms however, there will never be silences in the proper
sense of the word, let alone with the specificity and distinguishability of CA
analysis. If there are silences in real
time, the text will simply scroll together to cover these spaces. The
It is also important to locate techniques which will allow analysis of the differences in communicative responses between various Internet communication devices. In discussion groups and e-mails people observably take more time and care with what they write, and are therefore not as immediate in their communication as in Instant Messenger (IM) or chatroom conversations. Users of discussion groups and e-mail may use a spell/grammar check, and plan more consciously before posting their text. There is for instance a more textual format with discussion groups. But while Instant Messenger and chatrooms appear at first sight to be less disciplined and more varied, with the relative spontaneity of casual interchange ignoring many more formal communicative conventions, analysis has shown complex patterns of interpretive and pre-dispositional structuring under way. Messages from the Hurricane Floyd Messages Board, for instance appear more developed textually than the storm-related chatroom utterances – but is this an absolute, or a relative judgement? While IRC postings are far less grammatically formal, they remain as communicatively active and complex.
It is of course possible to postulate that, in the absence of directly
reciprocating co-locutors, postings must address an unknown and general audience,
in their quest for the specific addressee – and thus the more formalized and
“public” mode of expression. In an Instant Messenger chatroom, the contrary is
true. Interlocutors – most often established acquaintances, or at least those
who are able to establish cultural commonality within the immediate
communicative context – form responsive exchanges through their readings of
informal, yet nevertheless complex and sophisticated talk-texting repertoires.
I approached this case study
with two questions related to Computer-mediated communication: “Do computers
change conversation” and “Are Instant Messenger chatrooms closer to
off-line-person-to-person conversation than dialogue in a multivoiced chatroom?” It has certainly become obvious that
computers do change conversation, and especially in relation to the suppression
of paralinguistic cues, direct address carried by gaze or gesture, tonal
emphasis … all of those techniques used in “live” communication to manage the
conversational relation. While we have found many emerging
Yet in Instant Messenger or
any two-person-only chatroom there is more opportunity for an organized and
familiar turn-taking within communication, and therefore a more immediately
meaningful exchange, than in a multi-person chatroom. So how then might the
multi-person communicative repertoires of IRC be examined, to assess how
participants “manage” the complexities of their flows of talk? Which tools can
be used to assess techniques in use by IRC users, to overcome problems posed by
In Case Study Three, using
semiotic and pragmatic analysis as my tools of investigation of on-line chat, I
particularly wanted to uncover not just how “talk” is accomplished in a
chatroom, but how far chatroom “talk” generally may be said to include a
broader than usual repertoire of representation, working to “manage” talk
relation problems as outlined above, and to compensate the loss of off-line
conversational cues. Mihai
Nadin (1977) claims that the computer is in itself a semiotic machine, as it is
at core a machine that can be programmed to manipulate symbols. Using computers themselves as semiotic generators has an aesthetic
appeal to users, because semiotic codes change over time and provide new
meanings to old ideas. This seems interestingly close to the sorts of marked
creativity the IRC and IM users in particular display in the case studies for
this research – although the continuity of these creative “solutions” will communicational
problems on-line, with strategies and talk/texting techniques evolved in
off-line conversation and reading-writing practices, reduces the implied
suggestions that it is the
In this case study I focused on the most
obvious of the
I chose a chatroom named after a celebrity to firstly discover whether usernames, their “identity” sign-tags, would be reflective of the title of the chatroom. In this case study on “Britney Spears Chat” one chatter did indeed identify as a Britney fan: <baby_britney1>. This identification with the chat-title is consistent with what I have found in the other chatrooms in this thesis, such as in Case Study One, Hurricane Floyd, where there was the username <IMFLOYD>. In Case Study Four on astrology participants used the names “astrochat”, <AquarianBlue>, <TheGods> and <Night-Goddess_>; in Case Study Six, “web 3d animation” there were <web3dADM> and < Web3DCEO)> and in Case Study Seven, “baseball chat” <MLB-LADY> (major league baseball). Therefore it is evident that usernames can be directly associated with the name-directed topic of the chatroom. When the dialogue is read from the postings of these specific users it is clear that each chatter is indeed interested in the topic of the chatroom:
<AquarianBlue> in Case Study Four;
|
10). <AquarianBlue> Nicole 528 is gemini |
<web3dADM> in Case Study Six;
|
10) <web3dADM> just got the Cult3D folks to agree to show up on March 3 |
<MLBLADY> in Case Study Seven;
|
6. <MLBLADY> no clev fan but like wright |
But in each of these chatrooms there are also participants, as we saw in
each study, identifying against or outside the title-topic convention;
contributing postings off-topic; playing with textual form rather than
following content threads – even resisting efforts to bring them back on topic.
And both within and off topic, we have seen intense moments of creative
communicative play, frequently directed more towards the maintenance of
communicative relations than to focused engagement with talk topics.
Case Study Two, let us note, centred on inquiry into whether the
“playfulness” of on-line chat is a
In Case Study Three to fully explore this drive to identity performance
and exploration, to find out how users extend the actual communicative range of
the “language” or coding system used, it was first necessary to examine which
communicative functions were actually in use in the Britney Spears chatroom,
and to reveal which are dominant and recurrent.
Firstly, it was obvious in this chatroom that chatters employed usernames
as signs to give others clues about their identity – or at least about their
“preferred identity”, or particular identification with a Britney community. In
person-to-person conversation the clues that are given as aspects of identity
are personal – indeed, physical. On-line, these are replaced by the sorts of
identity markers which demark off-line social or cultural status: one’s employment or educational level for
instance.
Here, in keeping with the Britney world, user tags are about image and
“claiming”, or the image that one wishes to have represent one’s status within
the particular social context of the Britney chat group. Each asserts either a
relational claim, or one’s desirability as a relational being: <Mickey_P_IsMine>, <JeRz-BaByGurL>, <Pretty_Jennifer>, <baby_britney1>, <IM_2_MUCH_4U>, <AnGeL_GlRL>, <Luvable_gurl15>, <buttercup20031> and <guest-hotgirlz>. These
usernames suggest that the chatters, if not actually young girls, are at least
identified with a popular teen culture of physicality and cuteness. In
real-life <Luvable_gurl15> could be a 58 year old male, but if so he is
entirely conversant with the codes and values of the Britney culture – even
down to the assertiveness of the orthography: the post-feminist/netchick “gurl”
replacing the conventional – and less powerful – “girl”.
Secondly, the title of the chatroom identifies the chatters as interested in the celebrity icon, Britney Spears. The chatroom title alone can provide information on the identity of a participant; for example, in a chatroom such as “Iraq4u”. An adolescent chatroom such as this one is likely to focus discussion on aspects of personal self, as users construct identity around the image and stylized behaviours represented in their idol. A comparison table with a computer software discussion chat shows this to be true in the Britney Spears room. And yet there are distinguishing features beyond the level of topic as well. Abbreviations were used more extensively; suggesting that adolescent play over identity is also enacted within talk-texting strategies.
|
|
Emoticons too serve a purpose beyond just the saving of time. They are also a marker of informality, and so an “antilanguage”, in Halliday’s sense, indicating a special subcultural group identity, and used to show who is familiar or “up-to-date” with the latest language being used. Of the seven case studies, I have found the highest incidence of abbreviations (30%) and emoticons (6%) in the Britney Spears chatroom (see http://www.geocities.com/picture_poems/thesis/tables.htm for a statistical comparison of the seven chatrooms). In fact the abbreviation for laughing-out-loud “lol” was used fifteen times. In this chatroom frequency counts of specific language forms are indeed revelatory. There were 294 words used within the collected data corpus, with the personal pronoun “I” used the most frequently, (18 times) and “lol” used the next most frequently (15 times). In one sequence “lol” is used nine times in 20 turns, which is more frequent than in any other chatroom examined in this study. Another form of laughing-out-loud “LMAO” (Laughing my ass off) was used five times.
Firstly then, chatroom semiotics show the specialist communicative skill-level of the participator and whether he or she is in the right communicative arena to continue to be an accepted part of the chat community. Yet identity work of this kind in the Britney Spears chatroom is limited to the user name and the textual input of the chatter. By contrast, in face-to-face conversation, forms of identification are much more extensive and include cues which can reveal personal identity, national identity, occupational identity, corporate identity, gender identity and even religious identity (see Berger, 1998). So the talk-texting and linguistic creativity of these young chatters must achieve high levels of sophistication in order to convey all of the information needed to assert a “Britney” self, and yet remain a distinctive and desirable co-locutor in the “flattened” yet still competitive space of the chatroom. One dimension of chat which seems to become suppressed in these conditions is that of extended reciprocal conversation – those longer threads of debate, information exchange or narrative, which appear in some other chat spaces and cultures. Here, while such narratives of experience for example do exist, they are constantly interrupted by the “social recognition” postings of greetings and farewells, and reactive-expressive turns, working less to cement sociality than to maintain affective role within the chat relation.
Having established such high degrees of symbolic or creative-linguistic play, it becomes important with this chat culture to examine more carefully how this specific talk-texting repertoire works. Pragmatics as a lens of conversational analysis in chatrooms (Ayer, 1968; Pierce, 1980) can reveal a socially embedded reading of chat “talk”. Pragmatics helps to focus on how the various communicative items in chatrooms; emoticons, abbreviations and misspelled words as well as chat utterance sentence structures (CUSS) are used within an on-line linguistic society. Pragmatics in chatrooms starts from the observation that people use on-line language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts (Speech Act Theory is discussed in Case Study Four). Studies by Simeon J. Yates (1996) have shown that the language used in interactive speech in chatrooms more closely resembles spoken than written language, especially in the interpersonal respect (including use of personal pronouns). As I have shown, in Britney Spears chat, Table 8 - http://www.geocities.com/picture_poems/thesis/table8.htm (also on the CD) “I” has been used 18 times in the chat, the most used word in the whole chat.
Writing (or text-talking) back to a previous utterance in a synchronous conversational situation in chatrooms leads to a pragmatic re-contextualization of the use of the sorts of double-loaded semiotic expression discussed in Case Study Three. It is how the signs are read which provides meaning, and entices, or provokes, other participants to either continue building an utterance into a thread, or begin a new thread – including responses to its graphic or creative-abbreviation load. In Case Study Three there are several utterances that do not become threads, as they evoke no comment on them. For example neither of the following utterances have a response.
|
23. <baby_britney1> do any guys wanna chat? |
|
27.<SluGGie> need to fix my hair.. |
Despite the direct question/invitation in posting 23, and the focus on a Britney-culture preoccupation with physical appearance in posting 27, neither turn is answered. The sorts of creative play with chat-semiotic loadings which we have seen above appear more likely to evoke reciprocal posting, when otherwise powerful conversational and communicative strategies such as direct invitation or topic and contextual focus, do not. Even those postings which access and reproduce the contextual “antilanguage” or specialist codes, with the conventional attitudinal and behavioural signifiers in place, do not always succeed in chat. In these next two turns <Mickey_P_IsMine> similarly receives no response - but responds to him or her self in turn 64.
|
56. <Mickey_P_IsMine> Ahh i got a retest tomrrow mi failin math lol..and i think science |
|
64. <Mickey_P_IsMine> which i duno how im failin science |
The casual texting, including colloquialism (“dunno”), spelling lapses “tomrrow “, and “mi” for “im” = “I’M”) – even the “lol” abbreviation – code into the established styles of group talk – yet seemingly without sufficient creativity to gain notice. While responding to abbreviations and emoticons and colloquial forms and specialized lexical terms shows a commonality of understanding amongst those who are chatting, this appears not enough in itself to command a reply. Commonality is clearly indicated when <Paul665> in turn 44 asks <Jen> to give details on his or her self, and it is evident that to evoke a response <Paul665> must assume that Jen knows the abbreviation “asl”.
|
44. <Paul665> Ok Jenn asl |
<Pretty_Jennifer> responds:
|
51. <Pretty_Jennifer> 15/f/fl u? |
But while we can clearly see that here the codes are exchanged in perfect reciprocity, what we cannot do is calculate with certainty why this exchange succeeds, while others fail. The gambit is not as directive as in <baby_britney1>’s direct question in posting 23, so that we are left with an interesting possibility that the direct question works less effectively in this chat context than the coded-abbreviated “asl” convention: perhaps a signal of <Paul665>’s chat-credentials and comparative “cool” – while <baby-britney1> may be showing too much real-world social desperation and push. But it is impossible to be certain. Maybe chatters were attending to other surrounding threads as posting 23 arrived. It is at such points that textual analysis, no matter how multi-layered, begins to fail, and only ethnographic or observational work can succeed.
Since Case Study Three therefore raises the question of whether the conversation in each chatroom varies in its focus in relation to talk techniques, and not just in topic focus, this study moves to consider which talk forms are evident in chat, and whether variability in given chat spaces can be detected – and perhaps even predicted, from the “chat community” present. Case Study Four used Speech Act Theory to identify dominant types of speech activity in a single chat space. While IRC chat makes application of Speech Act Theory difficult, because of the indeterminacy of the “response”, it is still possible to categorise postings within the speech act repertoire, and, where threaded exchanges are evident, to evaluate the success or “felicity conditions” of an utterance. It remains difficult to assess how much of the intentional load of a chat utterance is carried by para-linguistic elements such as emoticons or abbreviations, codings shown as of immense communicative significance in previous case studies. Given the frequency of use and rapid assimilation of these elements into on-line communication in various media, it is important to attempt at least a preliminary investigation of their “speech act” role.
In chat there are clear examples of direct speech acts being deployed, and in quite conventional ways:
|
Speech Act |
Sentence |
Function |
Examples |
|
Assertion
|
Declarative.
|
conveys
information; is true or false |
(Case
Study Four) 11) <Nicole528> im a Gemini (Case
Study One) 10) <guest-MoreheadCityNC> NO she's near 10th & (Case
Study One) 77) <SWMPTHNG> THERE'LL BE PLENTY OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N
CAROLINA |
|
Question |
Interrogative |
elicits
information |
(Case
Study Four) 2) dingo42 nicole wahts your sign ?? (Case
Study Four) 17) <AquarianBlue> your meeting her judy? when? (Case
Study Four) 32) <Night-Goddess_> anyone cool in here? (Case
Study - 911) 182) Brazilian report: some one know any new about the manhattan situation
??? |
|
Orders
and Requests |
Imperative |
causes
others to behave in certain ways |