Side 2. Personal interest in new
genres of writing. 4
Slide 3. Java Script picture. 9
Slide 4. Writing: Interactive ~
Non-Interactive. 10
Slide 5. Logical map of the
ARPANET, 1971. 11
Slide 8 Sample of a
virtual-chat 13
Slide 10. 911 Moderated
example. 14
Slide 11 Example of entertainment
vs. Information chat 15
Slide 12. Features, which differentiate
chatroom ‘talk’ 15
Slide 13. 1. Emoticons and
abbreviations. 16
Slide. 14 Examples of foreign
emoticons. 17
Slide 15. Chat example, Baseball Chat 18
Slide 16. 2. Threads and
discontinuity. 18
Slide 18. 4. Fleeting text
~.. 19
Slide 19. The Self as other as
Avatar [the author
bytes]. 20
Slide 20. Chatroom graffiti: tagging,
crews, anti-languages. 20
Slide 20. Raw data – First
words. 21
Presentation abstract
Chatroom Discourse as a
new and unique genre.
This is the third and final series of a thirty-five year exploration of text used as new genres. During this time I have used text as an art form which I have referred to as picture-poetry since 1967. I have found similarities to my artistic endeavors of picture poems with my academic study of streetart and chatrooms as well as Internet literature. Picture poetry is a combination of art and writing where both are needed to tell the textual story. Whether using slashes of colour with text merged with it or combining photos and text as a collage I have given control and interpretative power to the reader-witness for him or her to ascribe meaning to the final piece. It is this merging of author reader and the importance of the two for a performance completeness that has led me to an academic study of textual communications as new genres.
Academically I have been
pursing text in various genres since 1991. My BA was in journalism and
literature and at this time I began to use computer mediated communications
(CMS). During the four years I studied I became increasing involved with
bulletin boards on the first widely used computers, the Commodore 64. The
ability to have a written discourse with others anywhere in the world that was
in real-time followed in my life-long interest of a shared creative writing
space. At this time chatrooms were increasing on the
Internet, with ‘The Well’ with its beginnings in 1985, being the most widely
used world-wide.
Following my BA I undertook
an Honours degree on another form of interactive
textual expression. My thesis was, ‘Graffiti as text: How youth communicate
through streetart’. I have discovered that several of the
features of chatroom ‘talk’ have similarities to streetart, including an universal language. Graffiti is used
and understood by youth cultures worldwide just as emoticons in chatrooms are shared world-wide. Both graffiti and chatrooms need several participators to make a story
complete. And the most outstanding feature the two share is that of the
‘fleeting-text’ and the disappearing or veiled author. In chatrooms the discourse disappears as it scrolls by on the
computer screen. Some text-based chat is possible to be copied and saved as a
word document. However, more and more chatrooms are
java windows which can only be copied and saved as a screen shot. The text in a
chatroom disappears and no matter what the chat-story
becomes, unless it is ‘captured’ somehow it disappears and is not
replicable. This same phenomena
occurs with illegal streetart. Either the council
describes it as vandalism and paints over it or rival crews (gangs) paint
comments, such as ‘toy’ or tag over the piece (streetart). Both graffiti and chatroom text have an anti-language or a new language that
is particular to the genre. With graffiti there are terms such as ‘crew’,
‘writer’, ‘piecing’, ‘toy’, ‘old school’, ‘tagging’ and a whole vocabulary of
words to describe different types of graffiti or the actual doing of it. Chatroom language is centred
around emoticons, abbreviations and usernames. As well as the ‘fleeting text’
there is also the unknown writer. Whether it is the graffitist using a name
which is tagged on either the piece or on its own, or the participator in a
chatroom with a username or a chatter using an avatar
in a 3D virtual world such as in Traveler (http://www.digitalspace.com/traveler/)
or a 2D virtual world as in MUDs or ‘The Palace’ (http://www.palace.com)
the author of the text is often hidden.
With my Masters thesis in new communicative mediums,
titled, ‘How the Internet changes literature’, I explored hypertext and the idea
of the never-ending story. Internet hypertext is similar to chatrooms with threads and discontinuity of text. One can
continue forever following links in websites just as one can carry on a chatroom dialogue forever. With hyperlinks on webpages creative narratives have user-defined links where
the reader becomes the author. This genre of writing was popular in the
mid-1990s and many hypertext stories became available at this time. Though there
appears to be a small market in hypertextual stories,
as a genre it is an important step on the way in the evolution of Internet
literature and chatroom genres. Eastgate[1]
was the original publisher on the Internet and continues to be the leader in
this form of interactive writing. Hypertext may eventually become a life style
and how we communicate and link with others may be based on how one exhibits and
defines the textual self in a virtual world. At the same time as I undertook my
Masters degree I began a Bachelor of Science degree at
Through a twist of events,
that I can only describe as the hypertext of my life. I was able to continue my
interest in new genres by beginning a PhD in 1998. I was fortunate to have a
lecturer at the
To further understand
‘talk’ in chatrooms I have undergone, through the
making of ‘case studies’, of different chatrooms a way
to describe how the communicational act is being understood. To accomplish that
I have borrowed from already established forms of conversational analysis such
as, Reader-response theory, Speech Act Theory, Conversational Analysis,
Discourse Analysis, CMC, and various schools of analysis. As chatrooms are a different form of communication than the
just mentioned no pre-existing theory is complete on its own. In my thesis I
borrow from these communicative acts and use what works and discard what
doesn’t.
At this time I am interested in the chatroom writing genre. What makes it unique from other forms of writing, such as a novel, sermon, children’s story, or poetry and even, to include what I am actually doing, an academic thesis. This paper discusses briefly what the features of online writing in chatrooms are which make it a genre of writing unique.
Presentation:
Slide
1. Slide Titles
Side
2. Personal interest in new genres of writing
I have been involved with
various new writing genres for the past 35-years. These writing styles have
broken away from traditional presentations of text standing alone in print and
with the incorporation of other mediums present writing possibilities seldom
explored in the past. During this period computers have changed the way we
express ourselves and write. From the first computers available to the general
public in the early 1970s produced by Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple
Computers to the first PCs (Personal Computers) to NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today’s computers the method
for new genres of writing have become more accessible.
I am interested in how
meaning is presented, interrelated, understood and shared between audiences and
producer, i.e. the author writer. With new models of presentation the text
interacts with other forms, such as art, to make the story or text unstable and
moldable into something new.
My argument that chatroom dialogue is a new genre, centres on chatrooms as a phenomena of the current communication evolution rising at the end of the 20th Century. Chatroom communication, I believe, is reflective, of or maybe a symptom of, or even possibly a cause of, chaos in communication in society. Out of this chaos may arise forms of communication that will not only enrich society through a communication format unavailable before online communication, but may give rise to a change in how we communicate with one another. Whether chatting will harm or benefit society will be examined many decades from now as hindsight. For now we are at the beginning of an exciting and global experiment and many millions of people are part of this with hundreds of thousand new participants every day. My presentation will look at both the unique features of chatroom ‘talk’ and at several sub-categories of chatrooms, which create new genres within a megachatroom genre.
My first exploration into
the possibility of a new writing style began in the mid-1960s. I became
interested in ‘Text as art’ and have explored this as a literary art genre since
1994. I refer to my multimedia presentations as picturepoems and have held
exhibitions throughout the
My honours,
(
In my Masters thesis at
My current PhD research,
“Conversational analysis of Chatroom Talk”, uses several theories of discourse
analysis to investigate chatroom ‘talk’. For my thesis I have moved from Reading
Theory, to Computer Mediated Communications, Semiotic Analysis, Speech Act
Theory, Discourse Analysis and Conversational Analysis in the process of finding
a way to analyze online chat and to create a method by which to interpret the
chat-act.
NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today’s paper looks at one area that has emerged from my
studies, chatrooms as a mega-genre of writing. It is a mega-genre of writing
because there are so many styles of writing available to those who write in
chatrooms. There are serious chatrooms and ones for entertainment, there are
purpose filled chatrooms as well as ‘members’ only chatrooms. There are as many
types of chatrooms as there are people online. However, with all this diversity there
are some specifics which identify chatroom writing as so unique it is not
possible to perform in any other format.
Dialogue in Internet chatrooms, despite interactions which appear founded in conversation, is primarily a writing form, though there is a combination of spoken and written form in the chat-act performance. Chatroom performance is similar to speech-acts. Examples can be found in oral story telling, rumour spreading, sermons and parliamentary debates and many other conversational acts performed in person-to-person communication. However, at the same time there are similarities to textual expressions used in written formats such as letter writing, novel, graffiti, and poetry publication. Chatrooms are one of an emergent genre of online writing. Other forms could be emails, discussion groups, MUDs, SMS messaging via mobile phones and palm computers, interactive consoles, as well as webpages and hypertext. The growing use of net-meetings online and game playing, and client-created virtual worlds such as Traveler (http://www.digitalspace.com/traveler/) which is a written performance operating in 3D worlds with Avatars and lip-sync real time audio, are also new forms of online writing. Immersive entertainment forms will fuse the writer and the reader in the future in a shared act of creativity. All of these present chat technologies as well as future technologies have their foundation in the chatroom text writing of the late 1990s.
What
may be missing with the virtual technologies of the future is the same as what
is missing in other online communication; that of physical cues, so important in
communication between people. The performer and the audience change roles with
other audiences and performers, and often there is no revelation of the identity
of a person, or whether at any given moment this person is the performer or the
audience. The author is never actually present. In actual fact he or she may not
even exist but the ‘other’ may be a bot (a computer
program which responds to input by others). These created genres of presentation
with their implied and ‘guessed at’ meaning may have powerful effects on the
future of society.
What results is a new genre of writing that encompasses many traditional writing styles and creates new ones. In my thesis I have sought to develop an ‘Online Discourse Analysis Method’ (ODAM), to capture, for analysis, the complexities of this emergent form of communication. This will become my Online Discourse Analysis Theory (nODAT) to use in future analysis of this genre.
I began my research four years ago, looking at chatroom discourse from a linguistic perspective instead of a psychological or sociological view, and I have stayed within a linguistic mode as much as possible. Now, at the end of my study, I am coming to the conclusion that what I am finding is fundamentally a writing style that may be historically unique to the end of the 1990s and first years of 2000. However, the impact it may have on global communication may continue, and this genre, that of chatroom discourse, may evolve into new genres and styles of writing and speaking, that are unimaginable now. As recently as twenty years ago, it was difficult to imagine electronic chatrooms being used by hundreds of millions of people for as many reasons as there are chatrooms. There have always been chatrooms, from cave-dwellers sitting around a fire, to Socrates, to King Arthur and his Knights, to our more recent chatrooms, such as, speakeasies, pubs, coffee houses and groups and meetings.
My research has examined the text-based chatroom, as this was the primary source of online interaction in 1998 when I began this study. I believe that research of text-based chatrooms will have a short-term cycle. It seems that text based chatrooms have been at the height of popularity during a relatively short period of history, starting around 1994, until the present day, and that this popularity is already beginning to wane.
It seems to me that the text-based genre of chatrooms is coming to an end. There are two factors which are contributing to this:
1. Firstly, there is a change in saving chatroom discourse due to the use of java script for chat sites (see slide 13 as an example). Java script opens a dialogue box on one’s computer screen which is not savable. With person-to-person, spoken, conversational analysis, the researcher uses tape recorders to examine data at a later time. This was similar to the way chatroom dialogues could be ‘captured’. The chat logs could be copied and pasted into a word document or saved as a file for later analysis. With Java Script the dialogue box cannot be copied and pasted unless each screen of text is captured with ‘print screen'. When a person logs off of the chatsite or off of their computer the java script is no longer available. This gives the fleeting and instant writing style of most current chatrooms.
Slide
3. Java Script picture
With the growth of multimedia chatrooms less text is being used for dialogue and the narrative of text based chat is changed. New multi-media, communicative tools and environments mediate communicative acts in ways not possible in a text-based only chatroom. Multimedia chatrooms use several other media such as pictures, videos and voice. As these types of chatrooms grow textual chatrooms will become less common.
Web-based chat systems are combining the
features of standard text chats with the graphics of avatar based chat as well
as sound. The author is often disguised as an icon with little recognition of
his or her intended persona. Java-based-multimedia chatrooms are performance
driven and the communication act is less linguistic and more representative,
though the traditional forms of discourse are still present such as speech acts
and reader response mechanics. Therefore, text-based chatrooms as a genre of
communicative writing may be short termed in the thousands of years of writing
history. It is only a blip or bubble on the timeline of human
discourse.
In this paper I will briefly discuss text based chats as a new genre of writing and highlight areas which gives this form of writing its diversity.
Slide
4. Writing: Interactive ~
Non-Interactive
There
are many ways to divide writing into genres. In my current research I have
started with a simple division of writing as either being Interactive or
non-interactive. The first categorization in my proposed method, Online
Discourse Analysis Method, which I develop further in my thesis looks at this
division of reader-response theory as a method of analysis of online discourse.
For the purpose of this presentation however, I have given a brief overview as a
graph on this slide. The difference between Interactive and Non-Interactive is
between a static style and a shared style where the final piece of writing is a
collaboration of others to produce a chat-narrative or chat-story or
chat-discourse.
Non-interactive
forms are writer only produced, such as books, newspapers and web sites. The
writing is one sided and any impute into the writing is afterwards and not
during the writing process. One could argue that there are some books which have
hand written notes in them and therefore, are interactive. For example, a
textbook from the library sometimes has notes in the margins that someone has
made. Many of these notes are quite personal and are the reader’s comments about
the material. Some books have several people who have written in the margins
with comments being made on comments. It then becomes similar to the writing on
toilet walls where people extend other’s writing. But in general, books and web
pages are final products, which provide little room for interaction.
A
commonality between chatrooms and webpages is the unpredictableness of hyperlinks in webpages and threads in a
chatroom. The flow of the narrative is often out of control of the audience. The
difference between webpages and chatrooms though, is that the audience is also
the narrator.
In
Interactive writing the reader and the writer together produce a text. For example graffiti on walls is an
interactive and writer-reader produced text. Youth who tag fences and walls are
even called writers.
Online
writing is the form I have investigated as the most interactive of all writing
genres. Of those, only a few forms provide full interactivity. Email is letter
writing and even though one can write on top of the email and return it, there
is not the full interactivity of writer and reader producing a piece of writing
together. Bulletin boards provide a low level of interactivity. MUDs are more of
a virtual room space with icons, and though they are interactive, they do not
result in a flowing text of writer-reader collaboration. MUDs are primarily role
playing narratives and a unique genre of creativity and story telling on its
own.
Instant Messenger (IM and ICQ) as well as SMS messages on
mobile phones are also interactive. But these two mediums are limited to two
people. It is the writing in chatrooms however, which produces the most unstable
and unpredictable style of writing.
Chatrooms come in all sizes and shapes. There can be fifty
people chatting at a time and within that there could be fifty different topics.
Chatrooms can be divided into sub categories such as topic specific and general
chats, moderated or unmoderated. It is the unmoderated general chatrooms
which, from my research, I have found to be the genre of writing that is the
most unpredictable.
Slide
5. Logical map of the ARPANET, 1971
I am showing how the Internet looked in 1971with this slide when the first structure of the Internet had only a few dozen nodes connected to one another now there are thousands of nodes but the original structure in its simplicity is similar in structure to a chatroom conversation with its many threads. The primary difference being that text-based chatrooms are a linear format whereas 3D multimedia chatrooms are in different places of the chat-map.
Slide
6. CMC
Computer-Mediated Communication is any form of communication using computers, including Internet, Intranet, Power Point displays and simple typing. Every writing genre is technology based, from the first recorded writing to Internet based writing. The areas I am interested in for my research narrows in on one of the four areas of computer usage involving Internet based technologies: usergroups, email, webpages and chatrooms.
Slide
7. Chat
Chatrooms come in many varieties. I have divided the area into three, two are text-based and one is voice-based. These are not clear divisions necessarily, and they all have aspects of each other.
Instant Messenger (IM), ICQ, SMS type of text-based-chat where only two people at a time are involved. This is a gender of writing that is difficult to research and analyze as it is not possible to observe two others chatting unless they allow a screen shot of their dialogue. But the writing style has several of the same qualities, use of emoticons, abbreviations and fleeting-text as a chatroom which has more than two speaking at the same time. Some of the multiple person chatroom features are difficult to employ in a two person chatroom. It is difficult to lurk as there is no conversation to lurk at. Threads and discontinuity are possible but it is not as chaotic as a multi person chat. However, there still exists a possibility for a very creative collaboration. SMS messaging on mobile (cell) phones is even more limited and the use of emoticons and abbreviations are vital as only a couple of dozen figures are allowed per message.
3D virtual chat or avatar-chat uses primarily
voice to communicate with. Many no longer do not use text at all, and though the
computer keyboard is used for navigation this form of chatroom is better suited
for role or game playing or performance orientated communication.
Slide
8 Sample of a virtual-chat
This slide shows two characters or avatars conversing. They can close in on one another or exist above, below or in another area of the chatroom. They can explore many virtual worlds together and discourse is through voice.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or text-base chat is a
linear scrollable conversation, and is what I will discuss for the rest of this
paper.
Slide
9. Chatroom Types
Moderated/un-moderated
http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/moderated_unmoderated.htm
For example,
placing these two chats side by side we can see the difference between a
moderated chatroom and an unmoderated chat. The
moderated chat in this example is controlled, and even though there is
interactivity, there is no room
allowed by the moderator for wide open free writing which is common in an
un-moderated chat room. Unmoderated chatrooms give one full ability to say what they wish and
when. Moderated chatrooms are censored to keep users
either on the given topic or to weed out people who are not suitable for that
particular chatroom. For example, a person may be pushed out of a chatroom for
using language not appropriate for that room. Moderated chatrooms are useful when an authority on a subject or a
popular person is available to chat with. If it is a popular person then it
would be difficult for thousands of people to all ask questions at the same
time. With an authority on a subject, just as shown in the moderated chat above,
the moderator is able to keep people on the subject matter. Moderated chatrooms tend not to have as many threads as unmoderated. Chatters do not go off onto tangents but are
forced to stay on one topic. Users submit their question and the moderator
passes it on to the quest ‘speaker. For example, in a moderated chat about
September 11th people form questions and answers and the chat appears
as an edit version of the conversation. The primary feature of moderated chats
is that they seldom use emoticons and abbreviations.
Slide
10. 911 Moderated example.
Moderator at
Do you have to be a skilled pilot to fly the 757/767? We're trying to understand how easy it would be for someone to just take control and man the flight.
ABCNEWS' John Nance at
Only a skilled pilot can takeoff, fly, and land a Boeing 757 or 767 and do it safely. It would be extremely difficult to imagine a small airplane pilot, untrained in large aircraft, initiating flight in such a big jet.
By noting the time difference between the question which the moderator selects from those submitted to ask the quest speaker and the amount of time for the response, five minutes, it is clear this is far from the chaos and emoticon and abbreviation filled dialogue of a text-based unmoderated chatroom. Both the moderator’s and the quest speaker’s chat is closer to email correspondence and the words and grammar are properly constructed.
General/Topic
Specific
The next division of a
chatroom is in it either being a general chat or a topic specific chat. With a
topic specific, such as a baseball or a computer information chatroom the topic
is defined by the name of the chatroom.
One chat server, talkcity.com, has thousands of named chatrooms for any topic imaginable. Because there are so
many choices of subject matter an individual chatroom, unless a popular topic,
has few people in it at any one time. An example of two topic specific sites
side by side are at:
http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/bondage_christian.htm
General chats are the wide
open many users talking one after another. There is difficulty in following the
script, and as will be mentioned in features of chatrooms in a moment it is the threads that make the chat
such a unique genre of writing.
Information/Entertainment
Slide
11 Example of entertainment vs. Information chat
The final division that
chatrooms can be put into are information or
entertainment. Entertainment chatrooms are usually
inhabited by users who do not reveal much, if anything of their physical self.
People have usernames that may be useful in identifying themselves to either
others or her or his self at the time they are in the chatroom. Information
chatrooms, like about a disease or a sport or a
computer program, usernames are not so important. What is happening is the
essence. The two examples in slide 11 demonstrate that in the information chat
when people are asking questions about what is happening in
Information
chat from 911 chat
Entertainment chat
<B_witched_2002-guest> 0HI
<tab_002> hi bwitch71
<soldier_boyedo835> 10Ok quit allready
In the entertainment chat the usernames are not similar to real names where they are in the information chat.
Slide
12. Features, which
differentiate chatroom ‘talk’
The
primary features, which differentiate text-chatroom ‘talk’ from non-electronic
writing are;
Emoticons and abbreviations
Spelling and Grammatical errors
Threads
and Discontinuity
Fleeting
text
Lurking
[Avatars]
Particular to 3D chat.
Chatroom graffiti: tagging, crews, anti-languages
Slide
13. 1. Emoticons and
abbreviations
The new global language as a result of electronic communications is based on emoticons and abbreviations. [anti-languages: new words, miss spelt word]
In chatroom writing there is a difference in writing styles in the use of an emoticon or an abbreviation from miss spelt words or grammatical errors. Emoticons and abbreviations have to have shared meaning and are becoming universal. Miss spelt words are often the result of the chatter typing too fast whereas emoticons are part of the chat genre. Being able to express one’s feeling so others know what the writer is intending gives this form of writing as stylistic aspect that has its closest writing style being hieroglyphics. In fact emoticons could be viewed as an electronic version of hieroglyphics. Linguistic chat units are the building blocks of online writing. The emoticon represents the smallest particles in a physics of online language in use.
Some abbreviations are the same, such as By The Way (BTW) even though the words are different in other languages. The most widely used emoticons and abbreviations are with SMS, text messaging on mobile phones with 750 million SMS messages per day, person-to-person text messaging alone, with additional SMS messages generated by Internet-to-mobile text messaging – will equal one billion messages per day. This will increase with MMS (multimedia messaging services) more in 2002.
Using symbols and abbreviations in writing is always risky. If others do not share the meaning of the signs then communication does not occur.
There are other comparisons to chatroom language, such as its similarity to the universality of music. For example with music, a system of musical notation in common practice in western music can be read and written equally by speakers of most world languages.
Slide.
14 Examples of foreign emoticons
Emoticons and abbreviations are developing into an international language where emoticons are the same, whether it is a French Chatroom or German or English speaking chatroom. Interestingly, musical notation has a similar universality. Notation in western music in common practice can be read and meaning can be made whether the musician, (the reader and sometimes the writer), is English speaking, Hungarian, Chinese or any other language speaker.
Spanish
Chatroom!!
:) mnemo: . . . . amutje
French Chatroom
:-) Toutes les grimaces permises dans le courrier électronique!
German chat [2]
:-) lachendes Gesicht, "nicht-alles-so-ernst-nehmen"
^_^ Smile
Dutch [3]
:) lachen
Japanese emoticons. Adapted to their culture.
According to The New York Times (August 12, 1996), the Japanese are using
emoticons even more than Westerners. In American
computers, each letter or punctuation mark is represented by one byte, a string
of eight zeroes and ones, allowing for 256 possible characters. But Japanese
computers use two bytes for each character, to allow for enough combinations to
represent all the kanji. For punctuation marks, Japanese users can choose
between single-byte and double-byte characters, with the latter being wider or
appearing double spaced. A double-byte smiley ( ---- ) is used to convey a
stronger feeling than a single-byte one and often merits a line of its own in
the message. ( -- ) [4]
Linguistic styles tend to form and converge faster in chatrooms than in discussion groups, or emails. If one person starts a linguistic trend in a chatroom then others follow. For example, one person using emoticons evokes others to use them as well; they imitate the style set up by the first person. This is an interesting phenomenon which I explore further in my thesis. Or in my example in this slide; .
Slide
15. Chat example, Baseball
Chat
In this
example of a chat which took place in a baseball chatroom one of the
participants asked the question,
Ø if you like the yanks press 3
In response to this question the next several
entrances were done in numbers to express the chatters points of view on this
question. See slide 15.
Slide
16. 2. Threads and
discontinuity
What categorizes chatroom
discourse more than any other factor is the threads and discontinuity of
conversation. What appears to be chaotic intent, like a sabotaged story, is
individuals responding to individuals and sometimes to the group. In slide 15
with the baseball talk, prior to the thread about whether the others in the room
liked the New York Yankees there was a discussion about who would win the
baseball world series, and another thread was about several individual players.
Few chatroom conversations, especially in general, non-topic orientated chats
continue on a particular thread for long. Even when the topic is about a
particular subject such as in the 911 chat there are threads about various
aspects of the topic. Keeping track of threads in a busy chatroom is almost an
art form in itself. Some text-based
chats have as many as fifty chatters and the text scrolls by at such a speed
that it takes a lot of concentration to follow what is being
discussed.
Slide
17. 3.
Lurking
Lurking
is the being there but not being there in a conversation. Linguistics instructor
(
Slide 18. 4. Fleeting text
~
What is written is seldom ‘captured’ for future reference or discussion. Othere literary genres, even those that are also Internet based, such as email or Noticeboard postings, are preserved, discussed and available as subjects of future writings. Chat dialogue, however, is seemingly chaotic and disappears when the chatroom is left or the computer is turned off. There is not a linear progression in text.
In a public chatroom, ideas, discussions, prose or poetry is seemingly chaotic and disappears when the chatroom is left or the computer is turned off. Chatters know that their text may be lost forever, yet ideas, prose, experiments of identity and statements are written that in other writing genres would be saved and elaborated on. Even if a chat dialogue is saved for future reference, there are seldom the same participants in the chatroom who were in it earlier to carry on the discussion.
Slide
19. The Self as other as Avatar [the author
bytes]
The
disappearance of the author. The author is at the same time invisible and
visible. Because there is the aspect that the author is simply a username and
not the actual person, the author is often as fleeting as the text. The
disruptiveness of this form of scripted “chat”, its fusion of behaviours from written and spoken modes, its redefinition
of ‘present communication’ though verbal or scripted co-presence, and its
dissolving of the commonly understood boundaries between speech and writing
means that the final product is always what is on the screen at any given time.
Whether by the use of a username or the use of an Avatar one’s virtual representation in an online world is real and not real at the same time. The digital self is a self creation. In the real world we are one person, but online we become another, maybe even more than one.
Slide 20. Chatroom graffiti: tagging,
crews, anti-languages
The common
terms of graffiti; tagging, crews and writing are similar in behaviour to what occurs in a text-based chatroom. Youth
form into groups or gangs which they call ‘crews’ to collaborate a piece of
writing. In a chatroom chatters combine to create a piece of writing. Every
chatroom conversation is unique and is impossible to have again. Taking into
account the random assortment of people at any one time in a chatroom and the
rushing by dialogue it would be close to impossible to ever repeat the
chat-story exactly as it appears. It is like several strangers crowed together
during rush-hour on a commuter train and a conversation occurring about an
accident that they all had just witnessed. There most likely would never be
another time when the same people got on the same train carriage at the same
moment and had the same experience. Chatrooms are even
more unstable as people change their usernames and go to any one of thousands of
chatrooms. For example, to record the same dialogue as
I ‘captured’ in the baseball chat with everyone giving the same response would
be rare.
Slide 20. Raw data – First
words
One other
feature of chatrooms is that they can have original
responses, the raw data of an experience, before it is filled with meaning
influenced by politics or anything else. I noted this in the 911 chat and this
is an example of people asking about something that they could not fathom. In
chatrooms a week or more later the events were
discussed, whereas in the first hours of the event few people, even those in
Slide 21. wrap up
This has been
a brief discussion of chatroom ‘talk’ as a special genre. Whether it will
continue as a linear turn-taking is unknowable at this time. From the direction
chatrooms are currently taking I would assume that
they won’t. However, in the history of writing, narrative, literature,
communication, chatroom writing is a unique study of human discourse at the
beginning of a new millennium which has been referred to as the communication
revolution.