Terrell Neuage ‘Conversational analysis of chatroom talk’ (Introduction)
14,798
Conversational Analysis of Chat Room Talk PHD thesis by Dr. Terrell Neuage University of South Australia National Library of Australia.
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1.
Introduction (‘The Nature of Conversation in Text-based Chatrooms’)
1.1 Evolution of language from early
utterances to chatroom utterances
1.2 Internet-based communication systems
1.2.1 E-mail, discussion forums
1.3.1 Print to computerization
1.4 Purpose of examining online
conversation
1.6 Are Chatrooms Public or Private?
1.8 Personal interest in researching online conversation
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.
The study of language is one of the
oldest branches of systematic inquiry, tracing back to classical
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.
|
© 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America http://www.archaeology.org/9903/newsbriefs/egypt.html Günter Dreyer.
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 NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - 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[7] to
identify an individual than there was with pre-online culture. The online user
is no longer an individual but a multifaceted product – with a possibility of a
never-ending array of identities. When there was only print the communication
process was an individual act. The communicator
presented text and it was interpreted by the witness of the text. With online
communication the text has no identity of its own but is instead directly associated
with a user’s self-created identity, to which it remains linked, much as oral
communication in face-to-face interactions is still considered to be
“authorised” or validated by the presence of the speaker. The difficulty is
however that the communicator is not in fact present, but re-presented.
Sociology Professor Sherry Turkle says in Life on the Screen:
Identity in the Age of the Internet that ‘The primary difference between
oral communication and electronic communication is how we re-address the Self’
(Turkle, p.56 1995) and this feature of online presence is addressed throughout
the case studies in this thesis.
Despite this problem of “absence”,
familiar from centuries of texted communicative practices, online communication
is simultaneously ‘restoring the mode and even the tempo of the interaction of
human minds to those of the oral tradition’ (Harnad, 2001). With the rapidity
of computers computer ‘talk’ is most often seen as similar to oral
communication, creating an oral-written text.
“…when reading on screen, the contemporary
reader returns somewhat to the posture of the reader of Antiquity. The
difference is that he reads a scroll which generally runs vertically and which
is endowed with the characteristics inherent to the form of the book since the
first centuries of the Christian era: pagination, index, tables, etc. The
combination of these two sysems which governed previous writing media (the
volumen, then the codex) results in an entirely original relation to texts….”
(Harnad, 2001)
A major feature of and influence on
modern communications is thus those telecommunications systems that have been
critical for the new revolution in communication. In the post-Gutenberg era
this can be regarded as the fourth revolution in knowledge production and
exchange, the first revolution in the history of human communication being
talk, emerging hundreds of thousands of years ago when language first emerged
in hominid evolution. Spoken language is considered a physiological and
biologically significant form of human communication that began about 100,000
years ago (Noble and Davidson, 1996).
The second cognitive and communicative
revolution centred on the advent of writing, tens of thousands of years ago.
Spoken language had already allowed the oral codification of thought; written
language now made it possible to preserve the codes independent of any
speaker/hearer.
The third revolution took place in our
own millennium with the invention of moveable type and the printing press.
Habermas considers the press as “the public sphere’s pre-eminent institution”
(Habermas, 1992b, p.181). With the printing press the laborious hand copying of
texts became obsolete and both the tempo and the scope of the written word
increased enormously. Texts could now be distributed so much more quickly and
widely that again the style of communication underwent qualitative changes.
Harnad, while perhaps dangerously close to a technological determinist mode of
analysis, believes that while “the transition from the oral tradition to the
written word made communication more reflective and solitary than direct
speech, print restored an interactive element, especially among scholars: and
if the scholarly ‘periodical’ was not born with the advent of printing, it
certainly came into its own. Scholarship could now be the collective,
cumulative and interactive enterprise it had always been destined to be.
Evolution had given us the cognitive wherewithal and technology had given us
the vehicle.” (Harnad, 1991) These three forms of communication had a
qualitative effect on how we think.
Our average speaking rate has a
biological parameter; it possesses a natural tempo dependant on the individual
speaker, but with hand writing the process of communication is slowed
down. In opening itself to communication
across space and across time, it also opens the possibility of receptive
interpretation: a more than usually active role for the “reader”. Hence, the
adaptations which evolve in texted communicative practice become strategic and
stylistic rather than neurological. The “performance” of text assesses its
end-user: the reader, known to be dispersed in time and place, and so less
easily controlled than is the “present” and remediable listener to spoken
words. With electronic communication however the pace of oral speech combines
with the necessity for strategic control. While “linked” in an
electronically-mediated relation of reciprocity (whether synchronous or
asynchronous) the online communicator is still in an “absent” relation with
co-communicators. While the brain can rapidly scan moving conversation as it
scrolls in a chatroom, reading and understanding many conversations in progress
at the same time, and the chatroom participant can engage any number of the
conversations, no “authorising” presence validates or directs reception. This
absence inherent in a texted communicative act invites compensatory strategies
People are likely to do what people
always do with new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or
foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new
kinds of communities possible. (Rheingold, 1995).
Together, these accounts of a developing
communicative social order show that it is through the interactive forms of the
day that society changes. The more
accessible communication becomes to everyone, the quicker ideas can be
exchanged and new meaning developed and shared. Through the exchange of ideas
and information, we become better-informed and thus able to make decisions,
which affect not only ourselves but also the world in which we live. Twentieth
century electronic media were a driving force of globalisation, producing an
acceleration of contact (See Giddens, 2000). As globalised economic
productivity arises to affect every person in the world the rapid flow of
information gives the advent to instant communication to make instant decisions
for governments and businesses. Personalized consumption of telecommunication
products is driving production within the global market, and instant electronic
digital computer-mediated communication (CMC – see Case Study Two) is keeping
it all moving fast enough to keep “desire” consumption revolving (See Castells,
1996, 1997, 2000). Wireless LAN technology (Local Area Network) is expected to
create the next boom for the networking industry, making communication
anywhere, anytime, and further driving both production of communications
technology goods as well as increasing the accessibility of communicative
services for consumers. In 1999 the Internet turned 30
years old. The first e-mail message was sent in 1972. The World Wide Web was
started in the early 1990s, and it went through an explosive expansion around
1995, growing at a rapid rate after that. (See A history of the Internet:
Hobbes' Internet Timeline http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/)
How then have we come to understand this new erruption
of communicative activity into the core of our social and personal behaviours?
James Carey (1985) has proposed that we have come to an explanation of what
communication is, through two forms of theorisation: a transmission view and a ritual
view of communication. The central theme of the transmission view shows how
information is conveyed or exchanged between communicators, within a simplified
and linear model of communication. Carey writes that the transmission view of
communication is the commonest in our culture. It is defined by terms such as "imparting,"
"sending," "transmitting," or "giving information to
others." It is formed from a metaphor of geography or transportation. (p.
45) Computer-Mediated communication is seen to serve these functions of
transmission at an increasingly rapid rate – frequently its dominant
promotional claim.
Because of the
paradoxical distantiation of Computer-mediated communication, for all its
vaunted ease of access, the individual is left to decipher the
information. Given the rate at which it
is transmitted, there is the question of whether information is being
communicated - or merely uploaded, and in such large packets that it becomes
useless. This “inhuman” pace has often been observed in chatrooms that have
many participants. The text scrolls by
at a rate that is almost impossible to decipher in order to respond to a
particular utterance. A transmission success may simultaneously be a
communication failure – an observation which invites a more complex view of
what communication actually is.
Carey’s ritual view of communication
focuses instead on the information transmitted. This information is directed
toward the maintenance of society in time, and not toward the extension of
messages in space. In a communication community the act of imparting
information involves a representation of shared beliefs, and a confident
expectation that even new experiences and observations can enter a common field
of interpretation. Once again, online
communication raises problems, however. Not all chatrooms can guarantee that
their “communities” actually do share beliefs, interests or any other
commonality. Language alone no longer specifies common interest, as culture
fragments into specialist strands of knowledge, belief and practice in a
pluralist context. While topic specific chatrooms often form into restricted
communities, controlling entry so that only the same participants may re-visit
the chatroom, in open, non-topic specific chatrooms visitors are random
communicators passing through the particular communicative repertoire, able to
participate to greater or lesser degrees, according to what sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu would call the “pre-dispositions” established across their personal
“cultural capital”. For Carey, that
“cultural capital” and the behavioural and attitudinal “pre-dispositions” it
engenders are the core of the communication “ritualised” within most modern
media texts.
...If
one examines a newspaper under a transmission view of communication, one sees
the medium as an instrument for disseminating news and knowledge...in larger
and larger packages over greater distances. Questions arise as to the effects
of this on audiences: news as enlightening or obscuring reality, as changing or
hardening attitudes, as breeding credibility or doubt.
A
ritual view of communication will focus on a different range of problems in
examining a newspaper. It will, for example, view reading a newspaper less as
sending or gaining information and more as attending a mass, a situation in
which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is
portrayed and confirmed. News reading, and writing, is a ritual act and
moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure
information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world. Moreover, as
readers make their way through the paper, they engage in a continual shift of
roles or of dramatic focus. (Carey 1985)
Electronic communication has been
important to globalisation and the rise of modern society, not simply for its
capacity to “transmit” neutral information globally and in real time, but as a
stage for the enactment of modernity itself, with all of its contending views
and forces. The evolution of the media has had important consequences for the
form that modern societies have acquired and it has been interwoven in crucial
ways with the major institutional transformations which have shaped modernity.
John B. Thompson argues that:
The
development of communication media was interwoven in complex ways with a
number of other developmental processes which, taken together, were
constitutive of what we have come to call ‘modernity’. Hence, if we wish
to understand the nature of modernity - that is, of the
institutional characteristics of modern societies and the life conditions
created by them - then we must give a central role to
the development of communication media and their impact (1995:3).
In particular, the reinforcement within
modern communications media of an individualised transmission and reception –
an increasingly personalised rather than a massed or communal pattern of use –
has produced the sorts of pluralism, selectivity and inclusivity /exclusivity
witnessed in CMC use. It is arguably these same features which have contributed
to the rise of “interactivity” as a dominant CMC form – one suited, I will
contend, to the “personalised” and “responsibilised” user-consumer central to
contemporary economic productivity and social order. It is within an analysis
of how ‘chatrooms’, as among the latest forms of
communication, ‘works’ or do es
not ‘work’ that I explore electronic conversation as a force of social change.
The World Wide Web is one of many
Internet-based communication systems[8]
and the source of this thesis. This study examines in detail examples of the
communicated message within the online environment, and seeks in particular to
find how meaning is shared within text-based chatrooms. I am interested in the
current online interactive environment, its departure from the culture of a
print milieu, and changes affecting both the
reader and the writer in that environment.
Of the many online practices that are
available, such as e-mail, newsgroups, virtual learning environments and
chatrooms, both text-based and multi-media enhanced environments, I have
concentrated on text-based chatrooms during the period 1995 to 2001. This is an
historical and time bound communicative environment, caught at the moment
before solely text-based chatrooms began to change, as they currently are, to
include sound and video. As online chatrooms grow in popularity and importance
and as the possibilities of these applications increase, so too, will the
analysing of these environments, both in depth and range. This study offers
preliminary ways of conducting such analysis.
My exploration of the establishment of at least some of the
rules operating within a "natural" language for the “unnatural”
location of text-based chatrooms will extend to how such communication is
constructed, within multi-user chatroom exchanges, in one-on-one Instant
Messenger services, and within discussion group environments such as listservs
and Bulletin Boards. Eggins and Slade in Analysing
Casual Conversation (1997), write that "Interacting is not just a
mechanical process of taking turns at producing sounds and words. Interacting
is a semantic activity, a process of making meanings" (p.6). It will be in
the analyzing of the “naturalising” processes which have been establishing text
online as just such a communicative activity that I hope to find and describe
new processes of meaning making in participants' conversation.
The main differences I hypothesize at the start of this
study include the view that communicative systems among online discussion
groups are not as casual as those evident in Instant Messenger (IM) or chatroom
conversation. In discussion-groups people observably take more time and care
with what they contribute. They may use a spell/grammar check, and think before
posting their text. There appears to be a more formally “textual” format with
discussion groups. Instant Messenger and chatrooms appear, at least at first
sight, to be less disciplined and more varied, with the relative spontaneity of
casual interchange unsettling many more formal communicative conventions.
At the same time however, I am aware that Conversational
Analysis (CA) has itself already shown that this apparent ”formlessness” is not
exactly the case in casual conversation (see ten Have, 1998, 1999; Schegloff, 1991; Eggins and Slade,
1997; Tannen, 1984). Within even “spontaneous” person-to-person talk there
are clear conventions and rules, such as Sacks’ influential discovery of the rules for ‘turn–taking’ when one
person talks at a time before responding to the speaker, including “Adjacency
pairs” (knowing what comes next), when one turn is related in predictable ways
to the previous and next turns; and “repair” (when there is a mistake there is
a correction). Within each such category of talk many variables are observable:
as for instance in repairing a mistake, where the speaker may correct himself
or herself, or the hearer may correct the speaker, or the hearer may prompt the
speaker by not responding, or the hearer
may prompt the speaker, by repeating
back what he or she just said. There is however clearly observable
limitation to such variability – and even predictability in technique
selection, expressive, at least in the Sacksian hypothesis, of the social
relations between speakers. My own
research suggests that there are similar, contextually based, regulatory forms
at work in online chat, and that any differences my analysis can establish will
be more a matter of degree than of essence.
At the outset it should be established
that even this study cannot include all the forms of Internet communication. E-mail
will be discussed below and compared to chatrooms throughout this study as well
as discussion groups. It would be impossible to cover every Internet
communication device. I am exploring primarily synchronous communication which
is “talk” in real time and e-mail and discussion groups are asynchronous
formats. Chatroom “talk” can be viewed by anyone who has access to the chatsite
– whilst e-mail is only possible to read if it has been sent to the viewer one
message at a time. Many forms of discussion forums[9]
such as Google groups which have absorbed many older online groups are online.
Google offers a complete 20-year Usenet Archive with over 700 million messages
dating back to 1981. I will only refer
in passing to these other online forms of discourse in this thesis. For instance,
in Case Studies 1 and the Post Script 911, I will give examples of message
boards in comparison to the chatroom ‘talk’ on the topics covered in those case
studies. In the first study I compare emergency messages left during a
hurricane with the discourse in a chatroom about the same hurricane. In the
Post Script 911 I compare the first lines of chat from a
The most common form of Internet communication, E-mail, is
replacing much of traditional letter writing, its primary difference being the
rapidity of response expected when an e-mail is sent. Unlike letters, which
often are not answered for a varying period of time, it is assumed that e-mail
will be responded to within a day or two. Therefore, e-mails tend to be
answered in haste with at least a short response, maybe even just a "got
your e-mail, am too busy to answer now, but will in a few days". Though e-mail can be a form of turn-taking
with people writing back and forth immediately after receiving correspondence,
it does not provide the conversational turn-taking choices chatroom does. John D. Ferrier did his PhD thesis at
Figure 2. Percent of Internet Users in
While e-mail is most often the first CMC service experienced
by new users, it does not always remain a preferred choice. Sending and
receiving e-mail was the dominant online activity in 12 countries over the
first six months of 2002, according to the Nielsen//NetRatings First Quarter
2002 Global Internet Trends report. Nielsen//NetRatings, found that at
least 75% of households with Internet access participated in e-mail.
(http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/).
The China Internet Information Centre (www.china.org.cn)
however reports that e-mail usage in
“s in
"The decrease is due to a decline
of the number of free e-mail boxes available, a more rational use of web
resource and an increase of various ways of communication," said Wang
Enhai, an official with the Centre. Many websites accelerated their pace to
charge e-mail service and web users began to give up superfluous e-mail
boxes. The average number of e-mail boxes
owned by every web user dropped from 3.9 two years ago to 2.6 last year, and to
1.6 now.“ (Shanghai Daily
“Statistics from
More than 50 percent of teenage
cyber-surfers in big cities across
Early forms of text based interactive
sites began in the mid to late 1980s with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and MUDS
(Multiple User Dimension, Multiple User Dungeon, or Multiple User Dialogue, or
Dungeons).
Internet
Relay Chat (IRC) is the most used online chat software and has many individual
server companies. Below shows IRCnet in comparison with several other IRC
servers. The table below helps show the popularity of different chat clients.
What is central to this thesis is that as more people begin to connect to
online chatrooms the importance of the transferring of meaning will increase.
Year |
DALnet |
EFnet |
Galaxy Net |
IRCnet |
MS Chat |
Undernet |
Webchat |
Max. 2000 |
78333 |
63985 |
16737 |
84231 |
15288 |
74945 |
17724 |
3rd Q. 1998 |
21000 |
37000 |
n/a |
24500 |
n/a |
24000 |
n/a |
IRC-Statistics / Kajetan Hinner (
http://www.hinner.com/) through the year 2000.
(The statistics above are from the
individual IRC servers as of November 2002)
Efnet (http://www.efnet.net/) is the oldest IRC
network. DALnet (http://www.dal.net/index.php3)
claims to be currently the largest Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, with over
140,000 concurrent users and 600,000 registered users, from all over the world.
The Undernet (http://www.undernet.org/)
is one of the largest realtime chat networks in the world, with approximately
45 servers connecting over 35 countries and serving more than 1,000,000 people
weekly and GalaxyNet (http://www.galaxynet.org/)
has about 25,000 users. Internet Relay Chat has formed a connectivity in a
decade that took the telephone more than one hundred years to make. People
are using the Internet to expand their social world. As well as uniting
cultures and nations when one has access to an Internet, communication can take
place at any time. This thesis seeks to discover how this communication amongst
so many people and often of mixed social backgrounds is maintained – using
chatrooms as a source of message creation and message meaning.
Internet
Relay Chat gained international fame during the First Gulf War in 1991[11], where IRC users could gather on a
single channel to hear updates from around the world as soon as they were
released. IRC had similar uses during the Russian coup against Gorbachev in
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) consists of various separate
networks (or "nets") of IRC servers, machines that allow users to
connect to IRC. Once connected to an IRC server on an IRC network, one is able
to join one or more "channels" and converse with others there. On EFnet,
there are more than 12,000 channels, each devoted to a different topic. Conversations may be public (where everyone
in a channel can see what you type) or private (messages between only two
people, who may or may not be on the same channel at the same time). Conversations rarely follow a sequential
pattern, "speakers" following one after the other. There are often
jumps to an earlier speaker, or someone beginning their own thread. This is the first departure point from “casual
conversation”. When there are many
"voices" at once, conversation becomes chaotic. The only way to follow who is
"talking" is through the log-on names. To analyse conversation
between two or more "speakers" I need to ‘cut and paste’ the
"speakers" I wish to analyse.
Even then it is not always clear who is speaking to whom, unless the
"speaker" names the addressee in their message. The speech is then,
seemingly inevitably, a "multilogue" or multi-directional system,
rather than the more conversationally organised "dialogue" we find in
print text. (See“multilogues”, Eggins and Slade 1997).
Public IRC is a text-based, international, message-handling program that
is on many Internet servers. Multiple communication channels (similar to radio
channels) can be created. Between them, these created channels and their range
of topic-specific channels, their text-mediated messaging and their capacity to
conceal as well as to express identity have introduced “communicative rituals”
which introduce the meta-message: "Let's make-believe and suspend
disbelief" (Ruedenberg, Danet, & Rosenbaum-Tamari, 1995). Allucquere
Stone, professor in film and media at
Generically the channels which
facilitate the more conversational forms of online communication are variously
designated ‘chatlines’ or ‘chatrooms’ and provide for discussion on every
conceivable topic. Access via a client program allows users to join and listen
in on (read) conversations on multiple channels on multiple servers. With
experience, four or five different channels can be attended to at one time. Once
the user logs in and writes, one line at a time, the “talk” is distributed, via
the servers, to everyone logged on reading that particular channel.
Jarkko Oikarinen in the Department of Information Processing
Science at the University of Oulu, Finland developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
in late August, 1988.[13]
His original goal was to create a communications programme which would allow
users of OuluBox[14],
a public access bulletin board service (BBS) administrated by the department,
to have real time discussions online. Previously, synchronous online
communication had been limited to two participants – a process which is now
popular with Instant Messenger services (see Case Study Two). When Oikarinen
began his work, OuluBox already had a programme called MultiUser Talk (MUT),
developed by Jukka Pihl. MUT allowed users to chat in real time, but lacked the
channel concept central to IRC. The existence of channels on IRC allows users
to join in to specific
discussions by connecting to the channel where the discussion is taking place,
just
as like a user of a citizen’s band (CB)
radio tunes into a specific channel.
MUDs as well as other constructs on the
Internet, such as MOOs (MUD-Object-Oriented), MUSE (Multiple-User Dimension),
MUCK (Multi-User Collective Kingdom) and MUSH - the "H" stands
for Hallucination (Harry Potter: Alere Flammas is a MUSH based on the Harry
Potter universe at http://digital-web.net/~hpotter/) are
computer programs, which allow users to log in and explore text and sometimes
graphics based virtual environments. Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs present a
world through text descriptions; players move around by typing sentences. In
MUDs, a user can simulate or “text” such physically impossible activities as
communicating telepathically,
shape-shifting, teleporting, creating
little machine selves, and conjuring
birds and pleasure domes out of thin air. Curiously, despite the magical aura of self-determining
expressivity this suggests, second person narrative is the viewpoint of choice
for text MUDs, the user able to type in a direct command to a character. It is the
reciprocity of this unusual modality – the capacity to respond to and outwit
the “actions” and orders of others online – which builds intensity and
attraction into a communicative relation which is otherwise mostly reserved for
unequal power relations in “live” or embodied conversational exchange. First person narratives, more conventionally
the stuff of expressive creativity, alienate the MUD user, since within this
particular texted universe a character focusing all actions on “I” will be perceived not so much as enhanced in autonomy, but as disconnected
from the creative dialogue of action development. The first-person text becomes
similar to a diary or journal, the other users
placed in the role of passive readers instead of active (co)directors. Within such
text-relations we can clearly see the degree to which and the speed with which
online “chat” participants have evolved new, surprising, yet powerful
“ritualisations” of communicative activity. While information is clearly being
transmitted in such MUDs, it is not flowing in anticipated or neutral ways –
nor in ways dictated solely by the technology. Complex social communicative
patterns are in evolution here.
From these MUDs have in turn evolved
MOOs, which allow the players to manipulate the (virtual) world of the game,
creating texted or graphic objects and new computer programs that run within
the MOO. Users “read” these text-constituted virtual realms rather than only
view them graphically – much as one might read the extended scenario texts at
the beginning of a Star Wars film. .”Action” is performed via keyboard,
either as texted instruction/description, or as key-command implementation of
graphic repertoires or special effects involving programming solutions. At core both the MUD and the MOO are
imaginative constructs: the players must render all scenes and actions
mentally, from text typed in during the course of play. Text is however an
efficient medium online, as with experience a few words can evoke a rich
response in the mind of the user. Text
MUDs rely more on cognition than on sensory perception. Spaces and avatars are
not – or rarely - viewed on the screen, but in the player's mind. Text MUDs are
abstract and cognitive since the characters and scenes are conveyed
symbolically rather than sensorially. (Lisette, 1995; Turkle, 1995, 1996; Utz,
2000; Bromberg, 1996; Cicognani, 1996, 1997, 1998). For example,
“Come to an intricate world where shadowy
influences battle for power in the realm of mortals. Join one of the many
classes, and perhaps practice the combat arts alongside your brother monks,
wield the power of the elements as a mage, or succumb to the dark delights of
the vampire. Dedicate yourself to the Divine Order of one of the ever-present
Deities, or rise to the highest stations of leadership.
Will you manipulate and scheme your
way to power and influence? Will you work to build a vast personal fortune?
Will you make your stand in the light for Truth and Renewal? Or will you strive
for that to which few mortals may aspire, to join the very ranks of the Divine?
Join us now in the Midnight Age, and
step into a realm of intrigue that will test your resolve, where you have the
power to tip the balance in the struggle between light and darkness.
Here, the fate you make is the only
fate you deserve. “http://www.aetolia.com
Each user takes control of a computerized persona, avatar,
character or object. Once each has created a “self” they can walk around, chat
with other characters, explore dangerous monster-infested areas, solve puzzles,
and create rooms or worlds and the action within them. When you join a MUD, you
create a character or several characters. You specify each one's gender and
other physical and psychological attributes. Other players in the MUD can see
this character’s description. It becomes your character's self-presentation, or
“avatar” – the online persona who carries out actions for you. The created
characters need not be human and there may be more than two genders. Players
create characters that have casual and romantic sex, hold jobs, attend rituals
and celebrations, fall in love, and get married. In many MUDs, players help build the virtual
world itself. Using a relatively simple programming language, they can make
"rooms" in the MUD, where they can set the stage and define the
rules. (Turkle, 1996, p. 54).
MUDs and MOOs are used in education as well as in social
skill development. AussieMOO (Theme:AussieMOO) is an
open-styled, experimental and research based MOO for social interaction. There
are MUDs for conferencing, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), lifelong
education (beyond just K-Ph.D), experimental psychology and philosophy. BioMOO is a virtual meeting place
for biology professionals; Cheshire Moon (Theme: CheshireMOOn)
represents the beginning of an important transition from the traditional
classroom lesson to computer-assisted learning, and
CollegeTown (Theme: "COLLEGETOWN) is a text based virtual
Academic Community. Its purpose is to serve as a platform for the scholarly
pursuits of students and faculty from around the world. COLLEGETOWN is a place
for folks to meet, hold classes and seminars, do research, carry out class
projects, and exchange ideas. “Folks who share our academic vision are most
welcome to apply for membership in our community! The COLLEGETOWN server is
located on the campus of
MUDs and MOOs as with IRC and World Wide Web chatrooms can
be totally text-based. Multimedia is becoming available in all these programs
but text is still the primary means of navigation and communication. What makes
MUDs and MOOs different from IRC is that in addition to being able to talk with
other people, the user is able to move around in an environment that he or she
helps to create. With IRC, someone opens a channel, others connect to the
channel to chat, everyone enters lines of text in order to communicate, and the
channel is closed when the last person leaves. With MOOs, the user connects via
telnet to a program that is running on one computer, enters lines of text to
communicate, and disconnects when done. Chatrooms do not have virtual
structures to move around in and unless the user leaves the room and goes to
another room there are no locational moves within an individual space. With IRC
there is little more than scrolling ‘speech’. With MUDs the user must also know
commands in order to communicate. In both applications users can chat in real
time, talk to many people at once or send private messages, and show actions
and emotions. Chatrooms however are much simpler spaces in which to
communicate, resting on foundations of everyday conversational practice, as
this thesis will demonstrate – albeit with additional layers of communicative
practice already beginning to emerge. Despite many fascinating features of MUD
and MOO communicative practice, this thesis is centred on the performance of
users in text-based chatrooms and not MUDs or other role-playing or virtual
environments where participants act out character roles in imaginary worlds,
all described in text. Like IRC, MUDs provide real-time chat, usually accessed
by telnetting into a remote Internet-connected server, whereas IRC can be
accessed via the World Wide Web. The technical difference between the two is
essentially that a MUD or MOO can be programmed, compiled, and saved while it
is still running. This means that the MOO does not have to be shut down for
work to be done on it. In order to program in IRC, however, it must be shut
down, hacked, recompiled, and started up again. And when an IRC channel is
closed everything shuts down and all communications contributed are lost.
However when a MOO is closed any visitor can re-open it and have an environment
still in place, with all the objects left by others. At this point the
technology itself influences the durability of the creation – and so of the
autonomy of the users, and arguably at least, of their focus into and
commitment to the site. It is perhaps in real world terms, the difference
between casual visits to an established social setting, such as a bar or café,
which may or may not become a preferred regular meeting place, and joining a special-interest
club, set up for and controlled by members. As French theorist Henri Lefebvre
(1995) has pointed out, it is the social geography of locations which
facilitates the various forms of social engagement experienced in everyday
life, and the insight appears no less true of the virtual “spaces” and “sites”
of online communication. But how have we come – and come so quickly – to regard
these “texted” or mediated, symbolic worlds as able to constrain and shape
communicative relations? And how might we be able to employ analytical
techniques evolved to uncover the regulatory systems behind communicative
practices in the physical world – talk relations between co-present speakers –
to scripted or programmed “talk texts” exchanged between non-present participants
in a CMC space?
Evolving techniques to analyse the specifics of Internet
conversation, whether in chatrooms, America Online's Instant Messenger (IM),
discussion groups, or in role playing games such as MUDs and MOOS, involves
consideration of two new paradigm shifts: the extension of print or text based
communications into the far more direct and interactive modes of CMC media, and
the changes within the already complex field of linguistics-based human
communications research, where descriptive systems-based work within pure
linguistics has moved on, to accommodate the social, cultural and political
considerations which have produced the contemporary focus on discourse
analysis. Consequently, bringing into being an "electronic interactive
conversational analysis" requires a cross over between print and
conversation-based analyses and theorizations, and a move into the broader
socio-cultural emphases of discourse.
Firstly, there is the shift from print
to computerization. Print relies on hierarchy and linearity, technologising
itself into organizational categories which privilege the producer or author
over the receiver or reader. With their focus on durability through both time
and space, print texts must carefully direct the use-patterns of their “remote”
user, to ensure that their messages remain intact. While CMC technologies have
moved to create a direct and seemingly intimate contact for users, they do so
through a communicative form soundly grounded in techniques of distantiation –
a move which can at times appear curiously regressive; for instance in the
return of screened text messages on mobile phones, a medium with more than a
century long tradition of direct oral contact. Those new forms of texting which
are emerging within CMC media thus seem to call for consideration of both print
and oral communicative practices – as well as of marked changes in the ways we
have traditionally conceived of text-based communication as separated into the
acts of production and reception.
CMC texts mix print and conversational
modes, in both production and reception. Online texts can be hypertextual as
well as or hierarchical and linear.
Webpages for example are hypertextual, with the viewer becoming the author of
how the content will follow, so that the medium promotes an especially active
“reception” of text messages, which many are arguing amounts to a form of
co-production (see Landow, 1992; Poster, 1995, 2001; Bolter, 1991).
Yet in a chatroom milieu, a communicative site often considered the least
formal or regulated in terms of genre control, there is only the simplest of
sequential patternings to structure the text exchanges. Chatrooms differ from
other forms of the World Wide Web in that only one line of text or one graphic
can be observed at a time, with the next
following rapidly in sequence and acting to de-focus what precedes it. Print
media have by definition allowed reading ahead - skipping the present and
reading to the end, or reviewing sections to check meaning - whereas in
chatrooms the near-real-time onward flow of communication limits acts of review
or preview. Textual chatrooms are not
clickable hypertextually, except for entries to other rooms or to leave the
Internet all together. Chat-text is not static like print text, but flows
across a relatively small screen space, and disappears above or below the
scroll capacity at near uncontrollable speeds. In this sense then, while chatrooms
at first sight appear much like any print form where one lines follows another,
the key difference comes from the control the user has of the medium. When the
chatroom texts scroll by there is nothing the viewer can do to prevent the next
line from appearing - unless he or she leaves the chatroom. Print media works
on a flow of conversation or writing directed to an organised progression, and
a stable retention of accessible text permitting revisiting through time. Online
chat-texts retain as their organizing principle only the sequencing learned
from conversation, and even with many participants co-existing on one screen
space, provide no further “technologised” means for controlling or categorizing
the “braided” texts which result. Unless users select a preferred line of talk
from the screen, and negotiate to shift their talk-partner into an alternative
software service – such as one-on-one chat via Instant Messenger – chat-texts
fragment into the sorts of multi-directionality which most speakers have
trouble with even in oral conversation, with its repertoire of compensatory
“focus” cues. Online, as text scrolls by at near conversational speeds, are we
already developing similar strategies? If so, are these talk-based, or text
based? And how can we extend current techniques of both print critique and conversation
analysis to witness, capture and understand such devices as they arise?
Within the very broad field of literary text analysis there has been a continuum of ideas that
have progressively led towards a major debate over how to define the roles of author and reader (see
the Case Studies in this thesis for further explanation, especially Case Study One,
which uses Reader-response theory to describe the communicative process). In
Communication Studies terms more generally, this dual focus on “production” and
“reception” of messages – terms which admit oral, text, graphic, audio and
screen imaged communications into consideration – has followed the same
developmental paradigm, moving throughout the twentieth century towards
admission of an increasingly active “audience/user” of mediated messages, and an increasingly
problematised concept of “authorship” or “production”.
Chatroom texts in many ways represent a peak enactment of
the dilemmas of this new paradigm of the “active user/absent producer”. Chat-texts at the level of individual
“postings” are near anonymous. Just as some texts don't require, or create, an
"author” – texts such as legends, myths, folk stories, fairy tales and
jokes – “users” or participants in chatrooms have become accustomed to operating
without the sorts of social and contextual information provided for live
conversation by the “author-ising” presence of the speaker, and in the
conventions of print texts, by the complex apparatus of author name, publisher
reputation, critical review, indices, contents listings, glossaries, and
arrangements into such structural codings as narrative sequencing, chapters,
headings, paragraphs, quote marks, footnotes, titles and etc.
Due to usernames (usernames are
discussed throughout this study, see for example: Case Study 1, 3 and 7) the
author of a chat posting is not known, except through what she or he reveals
subsequently about her or him self - and notoriously, this is not necessarily
who the author is, but a created identity. The chatroom situation is a
paradigmatic case of “the death of the author” as proclaimed by poststructuralists
such as Foucault (1969) and Barthes (1972). For Foucault, the author is decentred within
a text: no longer its originary source and guarantee of its meaning, but only a
part of its structure. So too in chat postings, where what Foucault describes
as “the author function” remains in the tag to each posted line, which
attributes each texted utterance to a particular participant. It is the degree
to which chat users still consider this a guarantee of self-expressive
authenticity or sincerity which creates the chatroom dilemma – and much of its
reputation for moral danger and duplicity: issues taken up elsewhere in this
study. If (or perhaps when) chat-texts become viewed as on a par with movie
representations or fictional print texts – products removed from their
originating “authors” by the apparatuses of production and distantiation – this
particular “author function” will change.
Just as Barthes and Foucault deny the traditional view of
the author as the only authority for interpretation and the origin of the text
and its meaning, my own study suggests that chat users are already moving to
both produce, and in turn demand from others, augmented interpretive repertoires
of an especially active “reading” of online texts (see Case Study One which
uses Reading-response theory to analyse the chatroom). Barthes in particular
puts into question a way of reading related to the author as an authority. In
1968 Barthes announced 'the death of the author' and 'the birth of the reader',
declaring that 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination'
(Barthes 1977, p.148). For
Barthes as for Foucault, the roles of reader and writer are historically
contingent, and open to change. According to Barthes, "the author is a
modern figure, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation" (1977). Roland
Barthes refers to the writer of a text as the orchestrator of what is
'already-written' rather than as its originator (Barthes, 1974, 21). With
this “death” of the author”, a text is
not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of
the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings,
none of them original, blend and clash. The text then is a collaboration of
lines or a “conversation” between this and prior texts – a point at which the
second element put in question within chat-texts presents itself: its problematic
abandonment of the sorts of structuring conventions used in other “print-based”
communicative forms.
For Barthes and Foucault texts are framed by other
texts in many ways. Intertextuality is a concept used to assert the idea that
each text exists in relation to other texts (See, Kristeva, 1980; Chandler, 2001). Landow
in his early work on CMC texts (1992) finds authors and their stories to be at
a point of crisis:
This technology -- that of the printed
book and its close relations, which include the typed or printed page --
engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a
physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable. The evidence of
hypertext, in other words, historicizes many of our current assumptions, thereby
forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as
corollaries to a particular technology rooted in specific times and places.
(Landow, 1992, p. 33).
Not everyone thinks that this change from print to
electronic publishing is progress. Many critics, such as Sven Birkerts (1995),
view this change as a potential disaster for literary culture and society in
general, suggesting that more is lost than a printer's bill when books move
online. In Writing Space (1991), J.
David Bolter has declared the electronic word as "The fourth great
technique of writing that will take its place beside the ancient papyrus roll,
the medieval codex, and the printed book". Similarly, Paul Delaney in The Digital Word (1993) has proclaimed
that “the most fundamental change in textual culture since Gutenberg is now
under way".
Florian Brody in “The Gutenberg Elegies” (1999) argues that
people are moving away from books for enlightenment and turning to the Internet
or the electronic text.
"The printed word is part of a
vestigial order that we are moving away from - by
choice or by societal compulsion… [We are moving away from] … "the
patterns and habits of the printed page and toward a new world distinguished by
its reliance on electronic communication". (p.118)
If we are moving from "the culture
of the book to the culture of electronic communication", Brody sees this
as being a loss instead of a gain, largely a result of the lack of
distantiating detachment allowing reflection and critical reading when e-texts
move remorselessly forward, as do chat-texts. The degree to which the
electronic accessibility of text however also permits a broadened “authorising”
of viewpoints: cuts across the categorising and regulatory control of text
messages, both as author-status and structural predictability, further enhances
what could be called “the reader function” – an opening of text to far broader
ranges of interpretations. In other words, while Brody and Birkerts, from well
within the high-culture conventions of complex literary structures and
high-status authorship roles, see the open and active audience/user/reader
figures of electronic texts as a cultural lapse, others – especially those
within a Communication Studies and Cultural Studies tradition focused on popular
media and on a commitment to broadening cultural interpretations (“reading
against the grain”) – have urged an equal if different degree of cultural power
in the relatively unstructured and anonymous or collective texts of the new
media.
To follow this debate
beyond the confines of established literary textual study – dominated as it was
by high-culture genres – both moves focus back from print-based to the more
fluid, conversational formats of electronic text, and admits into the
subsequent analysis of chat-texts those considerations of social and cultural
influence which Barthes and Foucault, among others, have shown as creating both
the structuring principles and the “authorship” status of the print tradition.
In both cases this moves us to review those theories which critique the
workings of language in both print and conversational modes: the still quite
loose and various conceptualisations of language in use as “discourses” (Van
Dijk, 1986).
The second paradigm shift crucial for this study is taking
place around the notion of "discourse", parallel to the shift from
print to active electronic texting on the Internet (see Landow 1992, pp. 1-11).
While studies of “language” have consistently taken us from actual communicative
acts – speech or text – in the direction of those structuring principles which
regulate and enable such communication (Pennycuick, 1988) more recent focus on
discourse has moved to show how socially and culturally regulated language
selectively endorses or pre-disposes social groups and individuals towards
preferred activities, behaviours and attitudes. Discourse is thus important in
this study of online communication. Not only did the Internet arrive with just
such sets of predisposed discursive framings around its re-technologisation of
communications (Castells, 2000), but within each of the variant communicative
activities it enabled (e-mail, IRC, MUDs, listervs, BBSs), “virtual
communities” of users rapidly established innovative discursive cultures of their
own. In this study I focus on chatrooms -
rapidly forming and disbanding communities – which of necessity, in
discourse terms, must be annexing – and perhaps to some extent establishing –
strong discursive frameworks in order to function as communicative sites. Often
participants have never met and will never communicate with others except in
these instant, momentary communities.
How then do chat communicants establish the principles on which their
messages will be exchanged? Since participants and analysts both report
insistent “policing” of certain selective and preferred chat behaviours online,
by both tacit and active means, how have such behaviours become established,
constructed around which models and criteria, and signaled in which acceptable
or unacceptable practices – given the limitation of behaviour to texted
language?
This research on electronic communication
is being undertaken at the same time as chatrooms are being used more (Mogge,
1999; Langston, 1996; Harrison,
and Stephen, 1995; Communication
Institute for Online Scholarship - http://www.cios.org). Online communication has become common
practice.
Online statistics change rapidly and there are several companies that track
moment by moment usage of Internet usage and participants in chatrooms. (See:
Cyber Atlas, http://cyberatlas.internet.com; Internet Statistics, http://www.internetstats.com; Nielsen net ratings, http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/;
Internet Society http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/).
What is really happening in this new form, and why is it spreading from
specialist to broad social categories of users? Are all chat users experiencing
and producing the same discursive forms in their chat use? Are there universals
or sub-cultural differences – and how far can discourse analysis help us to see
how, and why, these might be emerging?
Like other areas of the Internet,
chatrooms rapidly established regulatory sets of etiquette, and rules of
cybersense are continuously evolving. Netiquette customs and practices began in
the late 1980s with the widening use of e-mail and have been adopted in order
to promote effective electronic communication (See http://www3.usal.es/~nonverbal/researchers.htm which lists 135 current researchers doing academic work on online
communication.).
Netiquette has different rules for different online formats. The most
generally accepted Netiquette behaviours are based on having respect for others
in the online community. For example, using ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is considered
shouting and is hard on the eyes; "Flaming" or attacking others in
the online community or inciting or provoking an argument are considered
unacceptable to other users and often evoke banishment from sites by site
supervisors, and "Spamming" - posting something in many places at the
same time – is both actively discouraged and open to technical blocking via
protective software.
Beyond these relatively extreme sorts of
unacceptable communicative behaviour however lie many more subtle instances of
misapplied online communication. Jill and Wayne Freeze point out in their book “Introducing
WebTV”,
..what is written is not always what
is meant. A fair amount of meaning relies on inflection and body language. It
is best to clarify a person's intentions before jumping to conclusions or
getting defensive. (p. 135).
Since
"rules" are already widely established in online communication - for
instance, the convention that capitals imply shouting has extended from e-mail
to text-based chatrooms – it is worth
examining whether other regulatory impulses are becoming equally consensual and
universal in e-communication practice.
Other, more subtle conventions may be developing, as well as widespread
conventions for the abbreviated "talk" of CMC sites. This thesis will
propose that such regulatory behaviours are arising not at random, but in ways
which reflect the discursive framings of contemporary social and cultural
realities – which include for the first time significant formational influence
from the ‘virtual” realm of mediated CMC activities. What may have seemed small
and insignificant conventions, established who knows when or why, operating on
the specially reserved space of the Internet screen, have spread rapidly,
extended immense regulatory power, endured, jumped communication channels (eg
from IRC to SMS on mobile phones) and thus declared themselves meaningful or
discursively active – for discourse, by definition, constrains both concepts
and actions. If we find ourselves accessing punctuation keys to add a small
smiling face to an e-mail, or moving into numeral keys to produce phonetic
abbreviations, we are forcing both our text-composing minds and our
keyboarding/screenscanning bodies into a discourse – and anticipating that our
correspondents will too. How universal may these new behaviours become – and
will they attain the power to move beyond CMC usage and impact upon older
communications genres and formats – as contemporary press reports suggest?
More and more people are communicating
through electronic online services. It
is difficult to estimate the number of users online at any one moment. A large
number of surveys of online usage are available. According to Nua Internet[15]
an estimated 513.41 million users were on line as of August, 2001. Netsizer (http://www.netsizer.com/)
has a counter in real-time on their site showing both how many hosts and how
many users are going online every second. During the re-write of this thesis as
of
Problems of researching
online
Research online is different from
face-to-face research. In investigating Internet based communication one comes
across a different set of problems -
such as the researchers not being able to verify who the writer of the
text is, thereby determining whether the writing has any validity to it, and
not knowing if what is read is a cut-and-paste of several other writing
sources. Chatrooms offer even more complications to research.
Firstly, I have identified during this
study four key problems of researching online: identifying the “speaker’s”
intent in joining the chatroom; selecting from the enormous range of chatroom
material for analysis; identifying those people in cyberspace using multiple
names, and a consequent inability to do follow up work with participants. The
distantiation of the “texted” online talk; the capacity for and so invitation
to identity concealment, together constitute advantages for the self-protecting
online communicator – but problems for the conventional social-science
researcher. Those assumptions arising from “author function”, as outlined
above, mean that expectations of sincerity or authenticity in online
communication must be moderated – if not abandoned. While the personalisation
and informality of online texts invites disclosure and spontaneity, these are
no guarantee of authenticity – and, as this study, alongside many others, will
confirm, there is a great deal of counter-evidence for online communication as
a performative and calculated activity.
Add in the problems of intertextuality
and the technical ease of cut-and-paste message composition, and expectations
of authorial intent and expressiveness become very problematic. The dilemma is
compounded in IRC by the”multilogue” nature of the discussions. With multiple online
“authors”, each with decontextualised origins, who may or may not be
reproducing others’ texts, how are the discursive framings established?
Secondly, there is the sheer enormity of
the task in analyzing chatroom ‘talk’ as if it were one, stable entity. With
millions of chatrooms there is a wealth of material. Any “sampling” must
acknowledge its specificities, and the impossibility of establishing
“universal” rules for all (chat) spaces or eras. I have narrowed this topic to a very few chatrooms,
concentrating on seven chatrooms in seven case studies - although I have used
several other chatrooms to show a characteristic that may not have been obvious
in one of the chatrooms I “captured”. But this is a minute sample of what is
available. The study therefore is designed not to outline for all time what
online chat “is” or how it is “produced” – since the conditions I uncover may
already be past. For instance, one
problem with a study of anything involving a consumer technology is the inbuilt obsolescence
and the subsequent brevity of its
relevance. In this thesis I argue that
text-based chatrooms are already being augmented by other CMC technologies, to
the point that currently chatrooms have many features in common with telephone
and Internet conferencing communicative devices. But at a moment when both of
these are moving to video services, much of what I establish here as
“communicative enhancements” to supplement a visually-deprived communication,
may also change. Instead, what I hope to achieve with this study is to persuade
communications scholars and Internet users generally that what may seem
transient, trivial or temporary, was in itself richly meaningful, and that even
the most fleeting of communicative regulatory systems in one of the most
seemingly reduced or fragmentary forms – which I propose Internet Chat to
represent – is still formed within predominant discursive systems, and able to
carry complex communicative intent.
How then can “communicative intent” be considered, when, as I admit
in my thirdly problematisation of online research, people in cyberspace often
change their name for use in other chatrooms, and sometimes even within a
single chatroom? For example, in an academic chatroom where there is scholarly
discussion about an issue a person may log in as 'laProf'. In a sex-chatroom,
the same person may be 'lovelylegs'. In a political chatroom the person may
choose to be 'senator'. One's online character is only part of one's online
repertoire. A person can be a feather, fire hydrant, cloud or a riverbank. How
the person's 'speaking' persona changes in different chatrooms is an area I
explore throughout this study, not to pursue the theme of online identity
formation, common in first-generation Internet study (eg Turkle, 1995, 1996;
Rheingold, 1991; Castel, 2000)
but to examine how far language itself shifts with persona change. My first assumption
(see Methodology, 3.2. Key Assumptions) that people change their text-self in different chatrooms will
bring to the fore some of the ways in which such changes might be described and
identified. And it is in doing so: in shifting critical attention away from the
problem of online identity as always at least potentially performative rather
than fixed and essential, and instead focusing on how such performances are
enacted, that this study re-routes around the dilemma of intent. My focus is on
what occurs, rather than on what might be intended - and on how regularly
recurring patterns of “occurrence” may be able to reveal consensually
established communicative “rules”.
One methodological
constraint which online research at first sight appears to have the potential
to overcome is the capacity to “return” research findings for verification by
research subjects. Given the speed and ease of file exchange, it might be
anticipated that research results online could be quickly and accurately
assessed by the original data providers. But in the event, as I indicate in my
fourth aspect of online research shortcomings, there is an inability to do
follow-up work with participants in chatrooms. Unless a research subject is
identified – accurately – online, and their e-mail address is noted so that
they can be tracked within chatrooms, they become lost to the researcher. Rarely are the same people in the same
chatroom at the same time, so that online chat studies cannot be replicated.
And while in early pilot studies I intervened in chat sessions to outline my
project and seek cooperation – a technique which research ethics required
throughout this study – it rapidly became evident that for many if not most
online communicators this acted as an intrusion into the flow of communication:
one which they did not necessarily reject, but which altered, at least for a
time, the communicative dynamic. Their response raises a further contradiction
in online communication: its curious and perhaps unprecedented status,
somewhere between the personal and the public.
One of the first issues that must be
addressed by the researcher who examines chatrooms is whether chatrooms are
public or private spaces (Cybersociology)[18]. All exchanges within chatrooms, accessible to the public, are
legally public, unless there is a notice saying all the dialogue is
copyrighted. A chatroom where the participant has to log on as part of an
organisation such as a university, company or government web site, can be
regarded as private and confidential – at least to that specific community of
users. The behaviour of the participants on such sites may be different from a chatroom that is open to
the public without any registration details, e.g. e-mail address, and where
participants make up usernames which do not reflect or identify them – although
there is increasing evidence from this and other studies that a
strongly-emergent “chatroom style” often overcomes site-specific communicative
regulation .
This issue of public access versus
privacy is one I had to consider in regard to ensuring that methods I chose for
my study complied with the principles of ethical research. Mark Poster (1995,
p.67) argues that “The problem we face is that of defining the term ’public’”
and he posits that “The age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is
clearly over”. However, chatrooms can be private also if two people agree to
talk in a room and not allow anyone else in. I thus define the term “public” in
relation to my work as referring to what is available to be seen on the
computer screen by anyone with an Internet connection, leaving the implications
arising from such matters as “disclosure-talk” or use of limiting “private”
codes – common among “regular” chatters on a specific site - for analysis as the study progresses.
There are two primary categories of
text-based chatroom communication. Public channels or chatrooms on the Internet
that allow anyone to enter without registration are an open conversational
arena and what is said is clearly public. But it is also possible to set up a
chatroom which is by invitation only, such as those people set up on their
computer[19]
for IM or ICQ interaction, and these chatrooms are not displayed on the
Internet unless the owner of the chatroom chooses to do so. This allows a
number of participants to get together for a conference without anyone else
knowing. Some chatrooms similarly allow chatters to use a "whisper"
or private message mode, preventing unwanted chat inhibitors from witnessing
the communicative act. Such activities clearly signal a belief in and desire
for “private” chat, and might be expected to reveal different chat behaviours
in their usage. Since it is – perhaps perversely – easier to negotiate
permission to study the texted chats in such spaces (presumably because the
relation of “trust” which occasions the shift into private mode also
facilitates the granting of research access) this study will be able to
undertake such comparative analysis.
There remains the ongoing question within
Internet studies as to whether cyberspace is "real" and therefore
worthy of study. Judged from the energy
and fervour with which they participate, to most participants, chatrooms are
“real” created space. People are able to
express ideas, ask questions, and even to make arrangements to meet
physically. Many of the same experiences
can be gained within the chatroom environment as among people at a meeting,
party or at any social gathering; “chatrooms are suitable places for developing
the self socially, mentally and culturally, as well as shaping the character
traits of the self.” (Yee, 2000) Virtual
communities can be as important to those who visit the same chatroom as any
community in RL (Real Life) would be (See Rheingold, 1994, 1999; Turkle, 1995,
1996; Poster, 1999, 2001; Vallis, 1999 and 2001).
Real social
interchange in person-to-person or real-life situations with “real”
communication does however change abruptly once in an online chat environment
where the “other” is not known. The purpose of most communication is not
the exchange of factual information, but the establishment and maintenance of
social ties and structures: Carey’s “ritual communication” prioritized over
“transmission”. Online, when
we cannot identify the “other.” we do not know whether there is credibility
in what the “other” has to say, and they have the same problem with what we
would say. The traditional philosophic approach holds that sincerity and
competence are the underpinnings of credibility (Audi, 1998),
and while the distantiations of mediated and especially CMC communication have
eroded both confidence in and expectations of the former in favour of the
latter, online chat, like other communicative modes, proceeds as though such
guarantees were still in place. We still
need to know something about a person's social identity in order to know
how to act toward them. Even if, as Bourdieu suggests, it is the “cultural
capital” displayed in talk itself as much as anything else which controls our
communicative relation, we interpret this as in itself part of “character” or
“personality.” It is this consensus over social interaction conducted within
language which enables us to operate within online chat, in the absence of
other cues – and even to “chat” with those AI entities emerging to service our
information and entertainment needs.
With animated images (a machine attempting to pass as human)
now “communicating” in chatrooms as well as in commercials and even television
talk shows, we can no longer know with certainty whether we are speaking
with another human or a computer
program.
Virtual stars translate internationally. They don't age or
throw tantrums; they can master any language or skill, and can appear in more
than one place at the same time. "Real people have limits, "(Lewis,
1992), but Horipro has created the world’s first virtual teen idol, Kyoko Date.
Kyoko Date is an interesting subject. It/she stands on the edge between
technology and society, and yet is capable of carrying on conversations online.
KYOKO DATE: The world's first virtual
idol is eternally 17. She's the daughter of a
Kyoko’s capacity for convincing chat is
the ultimate illustration of my contention that not communicative intent –
since it/she can have none – but competence is the dominant marker controlling
our online communicative practice.
This thesis sets out only to examine
actual communicative practice. It defers considerations of whether online chat
is ‘true” communication, seeking rather to merely clarify some of the subtle
distinctions between real life and online virtual communication, describe how
they work, present some new research
findings regarding online conversations that take place within our current
forms of electronic communication, and outline how some of the analytical
techniques evolved for codifying and understanding both “natural” conversation
in real life contexts, and texted communicative genres presented for “reading”,
may be extended to consideration of online “chat”.
It explores seven text-based chatrooms during the period of
April 1998 and October 2001, using theories evolved in analysis of conventional
face-to-face conversation to develop methods of analysis of text-based
chatrooms.
This thesis is the third phase of my
academic research into new discourse genres. The first was my BA Honours Degree
(Deakin University, 1995) with the thesis entitled, “Graffiti as Text: How
youth communicate with one another through street art” and the second phase, moving into new
electronic communicative genres was my Masters thesis (Deakin, 1997), entitled,
”How the Internet changes literature”. Since 1965 I have been exploring genres
of writing as an artist, combining writing and art forms as an expression of
poetic communication.
My interest in electronic communication is first and
foremost an interest in communication. How do people exchange, relate and
create meaning? Having done the 1960s in
the
It is my belief that out of this mixture
of 1960s idealism, 1970s new-age spiritual explorations, 1980s multinational
marketing and globalization and the growth of the Internet of the 1990s, a need
to communicate with every one has emerged.
The paradigm has become ‘we are the world’. With the growth of the personal computer, the
Internet and then chatrooms, my once idealistic pursuit of communication with
different mindsets and various cultures became a reality. (See Giddens, 1991; Turkle, 1995). After a study of 35-years of astrology, metaphysics,
literature, art and philosophy I felt as if I had found what I had always been
looking for; a way of turn taking in conversation where there was not an
immediate dominance of culture, gender, philosophy, nationality or age. This thesis examines whether or not such a
possibility has indeed arrived, delivered by what we so frequently dismiss as
“Internet chat”.
[1]
(See for instance studies in online behaviours: Turkle, Rheingold, Reid, Poster
and Landow and in discourse practices see Kristeva and in the field of socio-linguistic,
Halliday)
[2] There are many texts on how language evolved. (See ‘The rise and fall of languages’, by
Dixon, 1977). He traces the theoretical
issues of languages from a comparative and historical linguistics view. For example,
[3] See, http://homestead.deja.com/user.robin_pfeifer/claytablets.html
viewed
[4] See http://home.swipnet.se/~w-63448/mespro.htm.
viewed
[5] See http://www.halfmoon.org/writing.html viewed
[6] ‘Rise Of The Human Race, The Civilizations Of The
Ancient Near East’
http://www.emayzine.com/lectures/sumeria.htm
viewed
[7] Everything that we do as a consumer leaves an electronic footprint whether it is shopping or using electronic equipment. Whatever we do on a computer (and/or network, internet, e-mail, instant messages) leaves an electronic footprint.
[8] For a
history of The Internet from its source see
[9] Newsgroups and list serves enable a group of network users interested in a common topic to exchange message. Central server handles the forwarding of mail to all subscribers to the list or conference. Participants need to know only mailing list address, not the addresses of all participants. This model has been extended to create electronic journals.
[11]
See http://www.provide.net/~bfield/polaris/topnoframe/top0151.htm
viewed
[12] ArabChat can be accessed at http://chat.arabchat.org/english/
as of 9-2001.
[13]
Original IRC history memo is at
http://www.mirc.co.uk/help/jarkko.txt Viewed
[14] For a history line of IRC see http://www.efnet.net/?page=history viewed
[17] See http://www.growingupdigital.com/
See also Internet Demographics and eCommerce Statistics http://www.commerce.net/research/stats/stats.html
for Internet traffic usage statistics.
[18] Research Methodology Online, Issue six: has
valuable information on doing online research http://www.cybersociology.com/
[19] The free webpage provider, Geocities, provides individual chatrooms for its members to put on their homepage
[20]
We marched on
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