Conversational
Analysis of Chatroom ‘talk’
PhD thesis - Terrell Neuage at the University of South Australia this page updated
16 March 2001: Adelaide
What
makes conversation unique is its history. Every
moment of communication has a life. If
we take a first meeting with someone in its most basic casual conversation and
follow it for the life of that first utterance we could have a life-time of
conversation based on those first utterances.
For
example, in January 1980 I was in Sydney at a conference. I had travelled from the States and was
staying at Sydney University. One
evening I stepped out of my room and asked the first person passing by what the
time was. It was our first exchange of
words and our first sighting of each other.
Twenty years later I am still affected by the first utterances we
made. In short the other person snapped
an answer at me. We met later at a
gathering at the conference. Months
later whilst visiting the States the person who gave me the time in Sydney
stopped in to visit me in Baltimore Maryland.
A few weeks later we drove across the States and I put her on a plane
back to Adelaide and I went on to Hawaii.
She rang me a few weeks later saying ‘guess what?’ She came to Hawaii, we married, had a son,
we all moved to Adelaide, had another child, got a divorce, I became a single
parent for the next 16 years and my youngest son recently signed a professional
contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers to play baseball and is now in Rookie
Camp in Florida. So after 20-years in South Australia, as a result of a casual
conversation I will return to the States to see my son play baseball.
The most obvious difference
with anything online is that it can be saved. Casual conversation
Return to Case Study One, Two,
Three, Four, Five
Return to Introduction for thesis
Return to Literature Review
Return to Bibliography