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<<<- back to Hurricane Floyd a PHD research into
Conversational Analysis of Chatroom ‘talk’ Thursday, March 15, 2001
Ø MAPPINGS
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.
Not all
casual conversation has quite that life.
Often we forget our passing utterances.
And in the world of online chat casual conversation takes on a newness of
utterances and its affects. However,
the same results could be the same as I had.
If I asked someone what time it was and they said it based on wherever
in the world they were and I followed and developed the conversation
WHO -
WHAT -
Floyd was a large and intense Cape Verde hurricane that pounded the central and
northern Bahama
islands
WHERE -
WHEN-
Updated Thursday, March 15, 2001 note this is a work in progress