Conversational Analysis of Chat-room ‘talk’ – Terrell Neuage - PHD thesis

 

 

 

Abstract ~ mappings ~ method ~ bibliography ~ thesis_URLs   CASE STUDY 7: 6:  5: 4: 3: 2: 1:

 

INTRODUCTION_TO THESIS  - Saturday, 9 February 2002 (10,794/12,991)

A.    Statement of the Problem of researching online

B.    Research Questions

C.    Research Hypothesis

D.    Personal interest in researching online conversation

E.    The purpose of examining online conversation

F.    Current modes of on-line communication Theories of discourse analysis

G.   Is electronic talk comparable to verbal talk?     

H.    The evolution of language from early utterances to chat-room dialogue

I.      SOCIOLOGICAL and psychological perspectives Cyberculture and Cyberstudies

J.     BIBLIOGRAPHY for INTRODUCTION

K.    Endnotes for Introduction

L.     NEXT SECTION – METHODOLOGY http://se.unisa.edu.au//phd/thesis/methodology.htm

 

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION TO THESIS OF CHATROOM “TALK”

 

 

It is my belief that through the interactive discourse forms of the day that society evolves. And the various issues facing us all will be managed.  Terrell Neuage

 

I am interested in the on-line interactive environment, its departure from the culture of a print milieu and its changes for both the reader and the writer. As on-line chatroom and discussion groups grow in popularity and importance and as these applications increase, so too will the analysing of these environments, in both depth and range.

1.                                   The problem of researching online

There are many forms of electronic communication to choose from. Therefore, identifying what area of electronic communication to analyse was the first task in this study. There is a continuing array of new communication forms being developed. How people 'talk' has gone through many transformations, from hieroglyphics to smoke signals to beating drums to electronic and now digital systems to share meaning. One of the first forms of non face-to-face 'turn-taking' communication available to most people in Western Society on a large scale was the telephone. Computers are the current step in non face-to-face 'turn-taking' communication being used on a worldwide scale. Currently, as discussed below, there are many technologies available to carry on online discourse, such as telephones, mobile phones with SMS text messages, hand-held computers, pagers, as well as computers in all sizes.

Research online is different from face-to-face research. There are the obvious differences: not always being able to verify who the writer of the text is, determining whether the writing has any validity to it and not knowing if what is read is a cut-and-paste of several other’s writings.  There is the problem of intent regarding why has the ‘speaker’ chosen to begin the turn-taking process in a specific chat area.  There is often no knowledge of the original, the beginning, the source or even the end of the discourse, as a chat room could be in operation continually.

Let us first examine one of the problems of not doing face-to-face research, namely, that of intent. Writing has a long history of questionable intent.  Research based on unknown writing is, at the best of times, experimental. For example, who wrote the Biblical line “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God” (John1:1)?  If we read it today, how many generations of “cut-and-paste” are involved.  What were the original words?  What did it mean? Whose translation are we quoting? We could say that we are talking about sound. Can we ask ‘what was the word that was in the beginning?’  Was the word spoken in Yiddish, American, French or were emoticons and abbreviations used as is common in chatrooms? 

When we don’t know the source and all we have is our perspective on something, then we are left with our translation of someone else’s meaning and translation of an earlier writing.  In other words we don’t have a clue.  Online research can have this same problem.  How do we do research online?  Obviously we do it online. When the research is on chatrooms the only way to do research is online. Just as one who is researching a radio talk show would need to record the conversation from the radio, one analysing chatrooms would need to save the data to a file for research.  Several problems with doing this will be addressed.

Another problem is the enormity of the task in analysing chatroom ‘talk’.  Where do we go from here?  I have narrowed this topic to a very few chat rooms; seven case studies. The problem with a study of anything involving technology is its shortness of relevance.  Every day I get emails from other researchers beginning to write theses or papers in this field.  Online conversation has become the trendy subject to investigate.

This study seeks to enhance understanding of communications within electronic textual sites. There have been several researchers who have begun discussing the Internet and communications within electronic sites (see Rheingold, 1985, 1991, 1994; Poster, 1988, 1990; Mattelart, 1996; Woolley, 1992; Eco, 1987; Gibson, 1986; Turkle, 1995) as well as by an increasing number of Internet based academics, such as Chandler, Landow and Cicognani. The French philosopher and social critic (hyperrealistic reporter), Jean Baudrillard is continuing his work in cyberspace, and is currently listed as an editor in CTHEORY, a weekly international journal of cultural theory, technology and philosophy.

When I started this research in 1997 I was able to gather very little material from anyone else doing an analysis of chatroom talk.  There were several who had written theses on the sociological and psychological aspects of online behaviours, but I was unable to find many researchers who were examining chat-communication from discourse linguistic theories, such as Conversational Analysis and Speech Act Theory.  The most I could find on Internet dialogue at the start of my research was from the semiotic researchers Daniel Chandler and George Paul Landow[1] who has published his research on hypertext at Brown University. Landow’s research is of limited value for analysis of chatroom “talk”, however, his research of hypertext has the similarity to my research as hypertext is one of the basis for moving around in cyberspace.

Therefore, due to limited researches in the field I am studying, I had the sense of “flying solo” at the beginning of my research.  On the positive side, this has given me the opportunity to break new ground; “blaze a new trail” in online conversational research.  In the recent years (2000 plus) there has been much interest in online communication from a linguistic theoretical view, as can be seen in my rapidly growing collection of resources on online communicate studies (http://se.unisa.edu.au/vc~essays.html). Therefore, I have been able to share in the exciting new developments in this area of knowledge and research which will undoubtedly have profound implications on our world because of the growing rate of use of the Internet.

If the social sciences’ two roles are, observation and explanation of human behaviour, then it is the chat-ethnographer’s responsibility to explain what is going on in ‘discourse communities’. Researchers such as Robin Hamman (http://www.cybersoc.com/) a doctoral student at the University of Westminster, London currently studying online communities takes an ethnographic approach to researching chatrooms.

An ethnographical approach provides a method for learning about, and learning how to talk about, that elusive process we call culture.  In this study I am discussing what is loosely referred to as an Internet culture.  This concept of an Internet Culture will be explored briefly in the conclusion and discussion chapter of this thesis. The purpose of my work is for me to gain experience in ethnographic practices such as interviewing, fieldwork, and qualitative analysis and to find the most appropriate method to examine the chatroom milieu. Most simply put it is the participant-observer in chatroom, the writer-reader of the text who influences and is influenced by the chat milieu. Though in essence I am more interested in the words as they appear and how meaning is derived from the often rapidly passing text on a screen; whether it is a computer or a device as small as the screen on a mobile telephone.

Are_chatrooms public or private? [2]

There is the question of whether communication on the World Wide Web, especially exchanges within chatrooms, are public or private. (Cybersociology)[3]. All exchanges within chatrooms, accessible to the public, are public, unless there is a notice saying all the dialogue is copy written. A chatroom where the participant has to log on as part of an organisation such as a university, company or government web site, could be private and confidential. The behaviour of participants could be different than in a chatroom that is open to the public and participants make up usernames which do not reflect or identify them. This issue of public and privacy will be further addressed in the discussion chapter. I have also addressed these issues of privacy and ethics of re-producing online discourse in my proposal to the ethics committee of the University of South Australia before I began this thesis.[4]

These areas of chatroom ‘space’ where talk is differentiated by anonymity (public), or the user is known (private) will be analysed for their grammar usage in the thesis of chatroom linguistics.  There are also various ‘types’ of chatrooms and I will elaborate on this further in this section.  Chatrooms can also be divided into either moderated or non-moderated. Moderated chatrooms can be subdivided into chatrooms where people submit questions and answers are provided.  This is most common in cases where people who are publicly known are in the chatroom, i.e. sport stars, politicians, and experts on a particular topic. Moderated chatrooms are ‘controlled’ by a particular person who controls the movement, the turn-taking, of chat.  For example, if there is inappropriate language which is considered offensive to others in the chatroom, the participant infringing can be prevented from continuing in the chatroom. Or if the ‘speaker’ wishes to dialogue on a topic that is not the assigned topic at that time, the moderator can block the ‘speaker’s’ messages from appearing in the chatroom. The chatrooms I will investigate are the open, non-moderated chatrooms as I believe these provide the opportunity for the flowing chat interaction I wish to analyse.  A question that I will explore throughout this thesis is “Are these chatrooms the closest to casual conversation?” And another question to address is whether we are all "eavesdropping" and taking a voyeuristic look into other’s conversations?

The emergence of the term 'chat' to describe electronic communication text forms is one indication of its difference from existing talk modes. There is the sense that online conversation is not serious and therefore may not be worthy of an intensive linguistic study. The term, 'chat', however captures only some of the dimensions of this emergent communication form. Chatrooms differ from TV or radio “chat shows”  in several ways.  Outside of the obvious physical voice giving a ‘hue’ to the speaker, the amount of dialogue which can be conveyed at any time in a chatroom is limited primarily due to the amount of words which can be put in a chatroom at a time.  This ‘speaking’ within a chatroom can be very much limited to the ability of the participant to be able to type quickly. A person able to type 120 words per minute will be able to convey much more in a short time than a person typing with one finger is able to perform.[5]  I have found in my research that in a chatroom, from examining many thousands of lines of chat, an average of five words is taken for each turn.  However, when conversation is ‘pieced’ together from ‘speakers’ a coherent conversation can be found.  In other electronic chat modes such as radio and television talk shows, more words are able to be ‘spoken’ by each individual.  The other major difference is the lack of control in most chatrooms of a topic if there is not a moderator. Whereas in radio and television chats there is a moderator who keeps control of the topic in a chatroom it is up to the others in the chatroom, if they care to, to control the topics.

There is little doubt whether there is any privacy on the World Wide Web. Several countries have been working on eavesdropping systems designed to intercept virtually all email and fax traffic in the world and subject it to automated analysis called ECHELON.  This system has recently been admitted by the US government to be in use and is intercepting all online communication.  Since September 11 the US government has vigorously defended its use of Echelon[6] to intercept terrorism threats.  However, there is not any reason why individuals could not use a similar system to observe other’s online activities.  This is already done using ‘cookies’ and placing pieces of codes on the World Wide Web (like ‘worms’) and furthermore, most chat sites are accessible by anyone who is capable of going online. V

Another behaviour that would be difficult, if not impossible, to know whether it is being done online is that a chatroom participant could easily insert pre-typed text. At a more functional level a particular phrase or word can be added to an ongoing conversation with the push of the copy (usually control-C) key on a computer. An example of this is in Case Study 3, the ‘Talk City’ chat of February 16, 2000. In this dialogue the ‘speaker’ “B_witched_2002-guest” copies in ‘OHI’ 37 times in 75 turns of ‘speech’. One-half of the conversation is computer generated. I will further examine this in chapter 8 when analysing this particular chat.

 

2. RESEARCH_QUESTIONS as a starting point toward analysing a culture of electronic-talk:

 

 

1)   Is turn taking negotiated within chatrooms?

2)   With the taking away of many identifying cues of participants (gender, nationality, age etc.) are issues of sexism and political correctness, as prevalent,  as in face-to-face talk?

3)     How is electronic chat reflective of current social discourse?       

4)     Is meaning contractible within Chatrooms?

5)     Will chatrooms (as part of an online discourse) create a universal language?

1)     How is turn-taking negotiated within chatrooms? What does turn - taking reveal?   In face-to-face conversation people can speak at the same time (talk over one another) but in chatrooms only one voice is ‘heard’ (seen) at a time because of the scrolling effect of the computer screen. In a chatroom where there are more than two ‘voices’ there are two primary functions in turn-taking that need addressing. Firstly, participants need to know when it is appropriate to ‘speak’ if he or she wishes to be heard and responded to. This is further broken down into two more functions of turn-taking. The ‘speaker’ is either addressing one particular participant in the chatroom or the ‘speaker’ is addressing the group.  For example, by referring to something someone said in particular ie. ‘how is 3 +3 equal to 11’ or ‘speaking’ to the group, ie. ‘whats the Mets/Bull score?’ the ‘speaker’ is identifying where he or she is placing ‘talk’.  Secondly, whereas in casual conversation between people ‘there has to be a way of determining who the next speaker is to be’ Eggins & Slade p. 25) in chatrooms, there is no protocol which indicates who the next speaker will be.  The next speaker is who ever hits their return key next. Turn-taking will be analysed and discussed throughout this work.

2)     With the taking away of many identifying cues of participants (gender, nationality, social and economical standing, age etc) are issues of gender, nationality, social and economical standing, age  as prevalent as in face-to-face talk? Does the chatroom milieu provide a pure communication space, where only words have meaning, and the author’s significance is only, the words produced.

3)     How is electronic chat reflective of current social discourse? I will examine whether eChat and in-person conversation appear to break down barriers between people of gender, nationality, social and economical standing, and age.  Some studies have shown th