Chapter 6 Conclusion and further research

Wednesday, 29 May 2002 8:24 PM 5,428

My conclusion to this thesis is in three sections as I have found that this work had three general themes that were developed during the course of my research. Firstly, I looked at several linguistic theories which I highlighted as being of possible use in the establishment of an Online Discourse Analysis Method. Secondly, I posed several questions on electronic conversation at the beginning of this thesis (See 1.2) and in each case study, of which there are seven, I suggested questions which were pertinent to the particular case study. And thirdly, my conclusion to this study is that I have been researching a new textual genre which may be of an historical significance.

I made several hypothesis at the beginning of this thesis and I have used these hypothesis as a structure for my thesis and to centre my questions which would help to establish an Online Discourse Analysis Method and to verify chatroom genres. My three hypothesis are that chatrooms are a new genre of writing and communicating style, that people create a different ‘textual self’ for each chat room environment they are in and that chatroom ‘talk’ does not differs from natural conversation.

6.1 ODAM – theories on the way to ODAM

My overall strategy in the development of this thesis was to look at several theories of conversational analysis and apply a theoretical framework to individual chatrooms. I took the six theories of ‘Reading-Response’, ‘Computer-Mediated Communication’, ‘Semiotic Analysis’, ‘Speech Act’, ‘Discourse Analysis’ and ‘Conversational Analysis’ theory as well as examining several schools of linguistics and modified them so as to have a method to look at conversation in a chatroom.

Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait (Pinker 2002, Lieberman, P. 1984 Piaget, J. 1926). The Internet chatroom, in its universality, may be part of the process of redefining what language is and how we are going to use it in the future to communicate. It is possible that most exchanges that are carried on in chatrooms are part of the entertainment cycle of the chatroom inhabitant. However, just as in any casual conversation the importance of exchange is fundamental to who we are how we understand our world around us and whether we are able to pass on meaning to someone else. Without language we cannot understand one another and it this new language that has developed rapidly since the mid-1980s as chatroom ‘talk’ that will effect our communicative endeavours. If chatroom language and turn-taking dialogue becomes a normal way of communication then our every day conversation may become either fragments as discourse in chatroom is or humans will learn to disassociate themselves from one stream of thought in order to engage in a hypertextual mindfield of broken conversational flow. At these early stages of electronic communication there may be a parallel drawn to the broken-‘English’ or pigeon of people learning a new language. As technology develops so that less text is typed, i.e. video, i.e web cameras and voice is used instead of keyboard type, chatrooms will take on more similarities to offline-person-to-person conversation.

Of the several theories which I have discussed in the case studies the primarily important theories for chatroom conversational analysis are Reading-response theory, semiotic analysis and discourse analysis. Finally I have used conversational analysis to create a coding of electronic talk. As I discussed in CS 1.2, ‘reading is as important to writing as listening is to speaking. It is the response to the text by the reader that creates the written dialogue of the reader-writer-listener-speaker in a chatroom.’ Even though I used different theories with specific case studies I found that the theories could have been applied to any of the case studies. However, using Reader-response theory in case study one I found significant as that chatroom was about an emergency. I looked at two emergency situations in the course of this research, a chatroom during Hurricane Floyd and several chatrooms during September 11^th in New York City. I found that in the Hurricane chatroom that it had the highest number of statements made to anyone in the chatroom, 40 percent, and overall there were 58 percent of the utterances in the emergency chatroom posed as statements. These figures were the average of the six chatrooms[1] with 58 percent of the dialogue being statements to either a particular person or to anyone in the chatroom[2], and 12 percent were answers to a previous utterance whilst 11 percent were questions to either a particular person or to anyone in the chatroom. What this indicates is that, in the chatrooms that I visited, the majority of the utterances