My purpose is to describe in detail the conversational interaction between participants in various forms of online text-based communication, by isolating and analysing its primary components.

Conversational process, according to analysts in many fields of communications[1] is rich in a variety of small behavioural elements, which are readily recognised and recorded. These elements combine and recombine in certain well-ordered rhythms of action and expression. In person-to-person offline confrontation there results a more or less integrated web of communication which is the foundation of all social relations (Guy & Allen, 1974, p. 48-51). Online chatrooms as an instance of electronic text-based communication also use many of these small behavioural elements at the same time: evolving system-specific techniques such as emoticons, abbreviations and even pre-recorded sounds provided by the chatroom (whistles, horns, sound bites or laughter). The full web of online exchange and exchange relational modulation devices however remains unmapped, and unless every word written online is captured it never will be mapped and analysed fully. In this study of seven case studies I capture and sample a moment in time of these online exchange behaviours, and look at them through the lens of several linguistic discourse theories.

1.1 Evolution of language from early utterances to chatroom utterances [2]

The study of language is one of the oldest branches of systematic inquiry, tracing back to classical India and Greece, with a rich and fruitful history of achievement (Chomsky, 2001). The basic building blocks of communication have changed little, but the methods through which we are able to use our linguistic abilities to convey ideas have changed drastically. From the era of pictograph accounts written on clay tablets in Sumeria[3] 5500 years ago, to the first evidence of writing during the Protoliterate period[4] (Sumerian civilization, to about 28 B.C.) it can be seen that forms of communication advanced and changed radically. For example, by 2800 B.C. the use of syllabic writing[5] had reduced the number of signs from nearly two thousand to six hundred[6]. Currently the English language uses 26 letters. Curiously, in the electronic era, with the use of emoticons in online communication there are once again hundreds of signs with which to communicate.

Sumerian Logographs -- circa 4000 BC

http://www.liveink.com/whatis/history.htm (c) Copyrighted Walker Reading Technologies, Inc. 2001

Early writing from Abydos, 300 miles south of Cairo, has ve been dated to between 3400 and 3200 B.C. was used to label containers.

We cannot know what the world was like before human language existed. For tens of thousands of years, language has developed to form modern systems of grammar and syntax, yet language origin theories by necessity remain based largely on speculation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were several proposals with labels which tended to signal the desperation of their authors: ‘ding-dong’, ‘bow-wow’ and ‘yo-he-ho’ theories (Barber, 1972), each attempting to explain in general social terms the origin of language.

While such conjecture must always remain unresolved, the rapid changes in communicative technologies in the late twentieth century, together with their markedly social or participatory bias, allows us to glimpse once again the intriguing degree to which ordinary people are willing to push the limits of communicative systems. With chatrooms, language itself may be going through new and rapid development – or, on the other hand, enthusiasts may be taking advantage of a brief experimental moment, acquiring expertise in communicative techniques which prove to be short-lived. This period of intense activity is however one among many steps in the long process of human communication. Certainly, chatroom communication (and its more recent take-up in mobile telephony’s SMSing) very obviously separates from traditional language through regulated processes of word corruption and its compensatory use of abbreviations and emoticons. (I explore emoticons in Case Study Three and abbreviations and other language parts in Case Study Seven). But how did these new forms emerge? What produced them? What does it mean that such innovation can arise in such a short time span? And are these limited, or generalisable, features of modern language use? These questions can only be answered definitively in the future, but they can be discussed and elements of the new practices and behaviours described now, as they are in this thesis.

It is thought that the first humans may have exchanged information through both aural articulation and gesture: crude grunts and hand signals. Gradually a complex system of spoken words and visual symbols was invented to represent what we would recognise as language. Earliest forms of telecommunication consisted of smoke signals, ringing a bell or physically transporting a memorised or texted message between two places. However, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, communication codes for meaning were exchanged at a greater distance across time and became accessible to more users. A standard postal system allowed people to send messages throughout the world in a matter of days. The development of the telegraph cable including the development of radio made real-time vocal communication over long distances a reality. The Internet is the most recent such advance in communication. It allows us, in a split second, to disseminate a seemingly limitless amount of information across the globe.

All communication however – from the earliest conjectured formations to the multi-media flows of today - involves interaction, and thus forms a basis for social relationships: webs of cooperation and competition, expressiveness and message-conveying, play and work – social functions which treat even the human body as a tool for activity. Language itself, evolving as a secondary use of physiological apparatus with otherwise directed purposes – the tongue, teeth, lips, breath, nose, larynx – constructs a self willing to sacrifice time, effort and attention to others, by re-forming the self into a communicating being.

All consequent communicative developments have at one level simply elaborated on this drive to “re-tool”, both within and beyond the body, as communities made more and more demands on socially regulated action. “Throughout the history of human communication, advances in technology have powered paradigmatic shifts…” (Frick, 1991). Technology changes how we communicate; big shifts in culture cannot occur until the communicative tools are available. The printing press is an example of this. Before its invention, scribal monks, sanctioned by the Church, had overseen the maintenance and hand copying of sacred texts for centuries (See Spender, 1980, 1995). The press resulted in widespread literacy, with books accessible and more affordable for all. The spread of literacy in turn changed communication, which changed the educational system and – to some degree at least - the class and authority structure. Literacy became a demand tool: a passport to the regulatory systems of the industrial-bureaucratic state emerging in the modern era.

There are many different ways of analyzing the history of the current dominant communication system. Whether one studies the historical, scientific, social, political economic or the psychological impact of these changes, depends on the analysis of the system. For example Lisa Jardine in Worldly Goods, (1996) studied the financial and economic forces of change. Elizabeth Eisenstein (1993) analysed the social and historical scientific approach, and Marshall McLuhan (1962) concentrated on the psychological impact of these changes. Jardine argues that the development from script to print was driven by economic, emerging capitalist markets forces. For example, letter exchanging occurred between merchants who had an increasing need for reliable information and this related to economic exchange. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan focused on the change from manuscript, which he saw as part of an oral society, to print, which transformed it into a visual culture. One of the main issues that arises with the shift from manuscript culture, to print, then to online culture, is accessibility. The more accessible communication is to a society, the more opportunities are present to exchange meaning, or as is often the case in chatrooms, to attempt to exchange meaning.

As new communication technologies advance, the individual using the technology has to face who they are when they are represented electronically instead of in person. Technology, such as the use of computers and mobile phones can mask the identity of the user at the same time it reveals the person. With technological communication the individual’s identity is not clear. Firstly, there is the opportunity to create an identity that is different from the real life person. Secondly this identity can be tracked. There is a larger footprint