Chapter 1 Case Studies *

CS 1. Case Study One *

CS 1.0 Introduction *

CS 1.0.1 Reason for choosing this chatroom *

CS 1.0.2 Background to Hurricane Floyd *

CS 1.0.3 Research Questions *

CS 1.1 Methodology *

CS 1.2 Reader-Response theory *

Language features *

CS 1.2.1 Skills of shared language *

CS 1.2.2 Linguistic skills *

Knowledge and skills of discourse structure and organization *

Knowledge of the world *

Metalinguistic knowledge and skills *

Phenomenological approach to reading *

CS 1.3 Discussion *

CS 1.3.1 Two readings of a chatroom *

Chat title *

Reading reader as author *

Chat text *

Three Hurricane Floyd discourses *

CS 1.4 Answers *

CS 1.4.1 The Reader is the writer who is writing the reader J *

CS 1.4.2 Does the reader or the writer, produce meaning within ‘this’ chatroom, or do they create meaning together? *

Table 4 CS 1:1 Raw data *

Table 4 CS 1:2 Isolated speakers *

Table 4 CS 1:3 Thread *

Table 4 CS 1:4 Framing speaker's utterances *

Table 4-CS 1:6 Purposeless statement *

Table 4-CS 1:7 Named statement *

Table 4-CS 1:8 Named non-existent user *

Table 4-CS 1:9 Too many words *

Table 4-CS 1:10 Grammar errors *

Table 4-CS 1:11 Grammar OK *

Table 4-CS 1:12 Mexican roofers (begin) *

Table 4-CS 1:13 Gun laws (Roofers 2) *

Table 4-CS 1:14 Faith in *

Table 4-CS 1:15 Identification with *

Table 4-CS 1:16 Information seeking *

Table 4-CS 1:17 Companionship seeking *

Table 4-CS 1:18 Beliefs (Gun laws - see CS 1:8) *

Table 4-CS 1:19 Faith in (see CS 1:9) *

Table 4-CS 1:20 'The self is a text?... *

Table 4-CS 1:21 <mahmoo> responds to <ankash> *

Table 4-CS 1:22 Read/write diagrams *

Table 4-CS 1:23 Enter key mishap *

Table 4 CS 1:24 Mexican roofers statement (see CS 1:25) *

Table 4 CS 1:26 sent back to mexico *

Table 4 CS 1:27 Britney Spears CS 3 *

Table 4 CS 1:28 Terrell statement *

Table 4 CS 1:29 Response to Terrell statement? *

Table 4 CS 1:30 Five turns re. Storm *

Table 4 CS 1:31 First lines in Case Study 3 *

Table 4 CS 1:32 First lines in Case Study 4 *

Table 4 CS 1:33 First lines in Case Study 5 *

Table 4 CS 1:34 First lines in Case Study 6 *

Table 4 CS 1:35 First lines in Case Study 7 *

Table 4 CS 1:37 First lines in bondage chatroom *

Table 4 CS 1:38 First lines in christian chatroom *

Table 4 CS 1:39 73 is not answered until 83 *

Table 4 CS 1:40 Utterance to... *

Table 4 CS 1:41 Answer un-named *

Table 4CS 1:42 Storm bulletin board *

Table 4 CS 1:43 Hurricane Floyd Messages board *

Table 4 CS 1:44 Floyd chatroom *

Table 4 CS 1:45 Annoyed response *

Table 4 CS 1:46 Pretty freaky *

Figure 4 CS1-1 Storm Map *

1. CS 1.0 Introduction

There are millions of chat rooms on the Internet (true?), catering to a huge range of discussion topics. all possible forms of human interaction. A majority of chat rooms however appear to have become seemingly stuck in the ‘hello’ or ‘anyone want to chat privately?’ categories. The chatrooms I am analysing are rich in turn-taking and developed conversation. This chapter on ‘storm’ is a study in chatroom linguistics during an emergency, and is my starting point in working with real-time interactive discourse.

Iit is my desire to focus in detail on the interactive complexities of on line talk which led me to I have discuss the ideas ed the literature of five four of the leading proponents of ‘Reader-Response’ theory in my literature review (2.2.3 ): Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Norman Holland, Julia Kristeva, and Umberto Eco, and these authors have been a particularn influence in this case study. I intend to begin my analysis of online "conversational" `practices by examining the reciprocity and interactivity of this curious textual form of talk, where readers and writers reverse roles in the mutual construction of "talk-texts"..

 

1. CS 1.0.1 Reason for choosing this chatroom

The first chatroom I examine in this study of conversation in chatrooms is a chatroom that was set up for Hurricane Floyd, a high-impact weather event in the USA in (day/month/year), which occasioned full alert status for emergency services in the region. . I chose this chatroom as the participants may be assumed to have had more urgent and compelling reasons to be involved in conversation than participants in most general chatrooms do. I indeed found differences between how people relate in an emergency and how they relate in other less urgent more social settings. One of my hypotheses for this thesis is whether people created a different 'textual self' for each electronic communications environment they are in, and that we cannot continue to regard all electronic textual practices as equal. For example, textual practices are different in a chatroom from than they are in an email. Chatrooms are multivoiced synchronous exchanges where many people often ‘speak’ before there is a chance to answer. In asynchronous email, on the other hand, there is time to respond without the dialogue scrolling by at a rapid rate.

A question arises as to the relativity of formational influences on chatroom behaviours. Whether Put simply, does the speaker makes the chatroom or does the chatroom create the speaker? It is certainly observably true that, J just as in physical speech real life situations, the style of talk in chatrooms parallels the specific an environment. For example, one may speak differently at a church supper and than at a brothel. I explore this concept of developing styles of ‘speech as home’ or how chatrooms can become a particular socially-regulated environment, even in the absence of a constraining set of architectural and culturally-binding physical cues: see based on the ‘talk’ in electronically created environments in Case Study Four, ‘Speech Acts as virtual places’ (CS 1.3.3).

This The first chatroom under investigation arose from an emergency situation, therefore I assumed when I first entered this chatroom, that, based only on the title, ‘Hurricane Floyd Chat’, that only conversation dealing with the emergency situation would be conducted. I did would not expect topics or spontaneous exchanges about relationships, politics or sports, for instance. to be discussed. One of my interests in this room was how a the ‘textual self’ was to be presented. I expected aAn emergency chat would most likely to be different from the a casual-chatroom-chat (CCC) which constitutes the major part of most chatroom conversation. In an emergency, I expected those present to be are seeking information that they could an use to protect themselves, or to reassure themselves that friends and relatives were safe.. I remembered experiences from earlier emergencies, where authorities had often appealed to citizens NOT to use personal communications systems, such as telephones or even public streets or walkways, leaving them free for emergency services, and depending on official media channels for "reliable" information and advice. What I found was that indeed there were few deviations from the topic, and every contributor discussed the storm at some point. Though many different threads developed in the conversation, each of whichwhich I ‘captured’, they were all related to the storm. What then were the techniques used to "focus" talk in this way, under this pressure of topic? How might speech behaviour from this site be used to set up a structuring model, from which to judge the far more common speech practices, in which a single topic focus is unable to take hold?

 

2. CS 1.0.2 Background to Hurricane Floyd

"On Sept. 15, 1999, a one-two punch combination of hurricanes hit North Carolina. Earlier, Hurricane Dennis jabbed once at the Carolina coast before doubling back and coming ashore as Tropical Storm Dennis on Sept. 5, packing torrential rains and 70 mile-per-hour winds. Then came the knockout punch—Hurricane Floyd—ten days later.

Figure 4 CS1-1 Storm Map

Floyd was a large and intense Cape Verde hurricane that pounded the central and northern Bahamas Islands, seriously threatened Florida, struck the coast of North Carolina and moved up the United States east coast into New England. It neared the threshold of ‘category five’ intensity on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale as it approached the Bahamas, and produced a flood disaster of immense proportions in the eastern United States, particularly in North Carolina.

South Carolina’s Ggovernor Gov. Jim Hodges ordered a mandatory evacuation of as many as 800,000 people in coastal areas NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today as Hurricane Floyd aimed for South Carolina's coast, just a week shy of the 10^th anniversary of Hurricane Hugo's destructive run through the state. Charleston South Carolina’s Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said that the entire city had to be evacuated, anticipating the eyewall of the storm passing over the metropolitan area." (North Carolina Register, September 15, 1999, p. 1).

4. CS 1.0.3 Research Questions

1. CS 1.1 Methodology

CS 1.2 Reader-Response theory

For reader response, there can be no pre-ordained ways of approaching and interpreting texts. No matter how far an author may attempt to control to reading of a text: no matter how overt his positioning of his preferred reader, for what he may think is the ideal reading, actual readers will create variant interpretations. And in the chatroom, where no posting can be made without an initial reading – where even the first participant of the day who "arrives" on site will "read" that circumstance and comment on it (perhaps with "Hi! All alone here: doesn’t anybody use this space?") – the authorial role of the "utterer" is heavily dependant for its continuance on the ongoing act of reading.

One purpose of my work is to find the most appropriate methods to examine the chatroom milieu and for this case study I have used Reader-Response theory. Most simply put, it is the participant-observer in the chatroom, the writer-reader of the text, who influences and is influenced by the chat milieu. But while this is at one level a shared and negotiative act, it is at another a private and self-assertive one.

A group of readers together in a reading environment, often a classroom or a library, sometimes for extended periods of time may be thought of as an interpretive community. Although this is a community of readers, a particular reader's initial engagement with a text is ordinarily a private event with meanings internally experienced in the consciousness of that reader and not necessarily shared. (Vandergrift 1987, p. 34).

 

As Vandergrift states above, a group of readers together in a reading environment may be viewed as an ‘interpretive community’ – perhaps producing the sort of consensus seen above in the "Mexican roofers" discussion during the Storm chats. . In this case study I will argue that online chatters are just such a community of readers, who engage with one another, usually, after they have read and given meaning to a prior utterance. Even before they become engaged in a chatroom conversation, participants need to read the title of the chatroom, so as to ‘go’ to a particular chatroom, selected for one of many possible a few reasons.

What you have written below is not analysis. It tails off into opinion: it’s too loose, and is off-focus.

Firstly, he or she may be attracted by the title of the chatroom. This would be equal to looking in a directory such as a phonebook under the word, ‘clubs’ and seeing the many categories there are; i.e. baseball, callisthenic, bush walking, pistol or croquet then looking under the many clubs to find one which sounds appealing. Secondly, chatters may have a pre-arranged meeting in a particular chatroom and go to it at a time suited to both parties. As Vandergrift mentions above, a reader initially engages with the text in privacy because the person is most often sitting alone in front of their computer when they read a text online. If the person engages the chatroom by writing, then the original private event of reading is shared and opened for others to engage in. Two features of chatroom ‘talk’ which I have emphasized in this case study are, firstly, the reading of the text; either the title or the utterances, as representative of truth, i.e. one believes the topics discussed in the chatroom are consistent with the title of the chatroom and that what is said is true. Secondly, the author is also the reader of the texts, both of his or her own writing and that of others in the chatroom.

My analytical approach to this Case Study departs from what is traditionally regarded as conversation analyses as I am incorporating a new dimension into ‘talk’, namely writing. Reading is as important to writing, and as prior to its enactment, as listening is to speaking (see Fiumara, 1994). It is the response to the text by the reader that evokes creates the written dialogue of the reader-writer-listener-speaker in a chatroom. For example, the extract analysed below shows that one person reads what another has written and answers it. Not only is the reader reading a previously posted text, but as he or she becomes the writer, it is clear that they are is also reading their own writing at the same time as they are writing.writing. There is, in effect, a metatextual awareness obvious. In some chatrooms we can even see what is being written at the same time as everyone else in the chatroom does.

Furthermore, a reader may respond, even before the first utterance is complete. The responder anticipates the remainder of the writer’s thoughts. This moves the chatroom’s "conversational" style into yet another realm of reader response, involving more than simply reading the text.

Terrell, once again you have slipped right off focus, into general ramble about factors that anyone could work out about chat. This is NOT analysis!! Analysis is when you work into the extracts, to show that your current analytical tool – reader response – because you have deferred the "process-task" discussion… is the right and necessary tool to expose THESE aspects of chat. You have to DO the analysis, and ORDER it correctly, to make your argument convincing.

Now, at the moment I am going through, weeding out the garbage and errors, and trying to focus this analysis work around the points you want to make, and using the examples you have selected.

Next, I will need to re-read all of this in print form, to see that the arguments flow as well as they can – which will probably mean moving some text around. Right now for instance, I cannot see why that "process task" idea is where it is, since you haven’t in fact moved to DO anything with it… I can only do that sort of assessment of "where things should be" in print form: you cannot conceptualise progression of that form in scrolling text (which may be one reason why you do it so badly!!)

So I’m going to stop here, and send you this, and also Case Study 3. This will give you about a week and a half of work to do, while I finish this, and move onto Case Study 2. (I’m working in this order because 3 was the last complete one I lost when the system failed: I felt I needed to redo it while I remembered it…) I’m doing all of the case study sections first, because I need to see that your analysis works, before deciding how much "intro" you need to do in the lit review and methodology sections…

This means it will take me about 3 weeks to complete your whole package – and by then, you should be able to start sending me back some of this, with the "Terrell: do this!" bits finished, and the text I have added de-underlined and integrated. (I think you’ll just have to use these bits of analysis: you IMPLY them but don’t actually DO them – and they MUST be there, or your examiner will see no evidence to support your ideas!)

OK: get down to it! It takes me a full working day to work into one of your chapters, (about 10 hours of work) – so that may help you to see a) the time that you’ll need yourself, and b) why it takes me so long: I don’t have many full working days to give; even with weekends that’s only 2-3 per week… You’ll have to do some more reading and library searches BTW, so glad you’ve got a university position!

Keep working.

Jackie

I am concerned with online conversation which is text based . When I began this thesis (1998) textual interfaces in chatrooms were the norm, following the early stages of direct on-line communication, when email, newsgroups and chat-rooms were developed (cite historical studies.). Text based chatrooms are easy to download to computers as they do not take a lot of computer memory to operate. As computers have become more powerful however, chatrooms have developed multimedia applications such as web cams and voice based systems chats for chatters to add to their conversation. As a medium for exchanging ideas, communicating using text online has a number of qualities that are useful with exchanging information. Firstly, text is highly adaptable, for example, the alphanumeric keyboard is common, and therefore people can assemble discourses on any topic. Using emoticons and abbreviations, discourse online can be quite expressive. Secondly, anyone can communicate online without concern for having his or her text being judged by appearance of the person.

44. <guest-Capt>

VIAGRA AND PRUNE JUICE....DON'T KNOW IF I'M COMING OR GOING.....

Table 4-CS :5 Purposeless statement

Would the above utterance be interpreted differently if we knew the gender, age, race or appearance of the person speaking? In the chatroom this utterance was taken from, see appendix 1, table 2, no one responded to this statement. However, the utterance below would indicate that the speaker, <<IMFLOYD> is interested in Julie. At a quick glance one would think that this was part of one person flirting with another. In the 199 turns I captured before this utterance there was no speaker named Julie nor any mention of a person named Julie. All thirteen turns of <IMFLOYD> (See appendix 1, table 10) are about the storm the chat is discussing (thus the user name <IM Floyd>) and there is only one other mention of Julie

257 <IM Floyd> julie..........wouldnt u b

Table 4-CS :6 Named statement

(turn 257, eight turns later) and then nothing more is said on the Julie topic. Also, <IMFLOYD> speaks to another female named ‘Christina’ three times and in the other 10 of fourteen turns makes only statements about the storm. One other fact is that there is no one named Christina in the chatroom either.

200 <IMFLOYD> julie........u charm me

228 <IMFLOYD> hello Christina

251 <IMFLOYD> goodbye Christina

Table 4-CS :7 Named non-existent user

In order to establish a methodology of analysis of this chatroom, ‘Storm’, I use ‘Reception and Reader-Response Theory’ for my methodology to investigate chatroom ‘talk’. Reader-Response Theory was useful to this study but it needed modification and the addition of features particular to chatrooms and thus it has become part of my overall method of chatroom conversation analysis.

Reader-Response Theory is used to reveal the complex web of authorship, readership and intersubjectivity. The first difficulty in using an unmodified Reader-Response Theory is that it is often impossible to identify the author. The author may be using an avatar or username as being representative of some aspect of his or her self that is being revealed at that particular time. The author is able to have a multiple-representation of him or her self within the same chatroom by having several usernames at the same time. Another complication of reading chatrooms, is the fact that not only is the author unknown, but the reader can also be unknown. To add to this, the author and the reader can be the same person. Not only is the dialogue in a chatroom important as ‘read speech’ but the reading of the title to the chatroom is important for the title of a chatroom must be presumed to attract readers and writers but it does not guarantee consistency of topic which further complicates the reading.

Reading-Response Theory is one of many reading theories which seeks to decode a text. How this is done has, however, many variations and critics, and schools of thought. I cover only a few of the contributors to this field, as I want to take the idea of a reader and turn it into one who communicates both as reader-writer and as speaker-listener, while simultaneously viewing the text. Without examining how one reads words in a chatroom, an investigator cannot find answers to the questions of turn taking, meaning, conversation and development of a textual self. Simply put, before a response can begin, one needs to read the words for which one is responding.

The reader of the text is written about by such theorists as Umberto Eco who writes of ‘The model reader’ (1979), Kristeva ‘The Ideal Reader’ (1986), Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Ideal "implied" Reader (1978), Fish’s (1980) "informed reader," as well as other writers. Gadamer talks about the "original reader", and Barthes gives the power of the text to the reader, going as far as to say that the reader is 'no longer the consumer but the producer of the text' in his writing on the death of the author. There are others who offer variations on this the construed ‘perfect reader’, and almost any discussion of philosophy, psychology, sociology will have discussions on who the reader is. But who is the proper reader in a chatroom? I believe that the perfect reader in a chatroom is one who is able to interact with what is written, so that others can respond to what he or she writes.

The only way we can know if someone has responded in a chatroom to what we wrote, is by what they write in answer. The person in the chatroom can perform one of two roles or both roles. One is the role of the witness, who is the reader; the second is the role of the responder; the one who writes, or speaks. Even before the roles are enacted, there is the choice of whether to play both roles. For example, one can lurk in a chatroom and only read and not respond. In Case Study One, there were 48 participants who took 279 turns (Appendix One, table 10). However, four of the 48 people in the chatroom made only introductory comments, though it would be impossible to consider them lurkers as they entered toward the end of my recording of this event. However, they showed they had taken on a lurker’s attributes by commenting on earlier dialogue, such as turn 208 saying, ‘LA sent a bunch of crews NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today’, signifying he or she knew what the chatroom topic was about. However, this ‘captured’ chat is an isolated portion of a larger chat, which could have gone for days as this chatroom was continuous.

Whether ‘the reader is the writer who is writing the reader’ is firstly explored by asking, ‘Does the reader or the writer, produce meaning within ‘this’ chatroom, or do they create meaning together?’ Reading Response theory claims that a text, any text, has no meaning whatsoever until it is actually read (Iser 1978, Eco 1979, Kristeva 1996). Other writers examine reading from a psychological perspective (Holland, Barthes, Fish) and they take into account the reader’s mindset and what they bring to the text from their personal experiences, which, in turn, influences their interpretation of the text (Holland, Iser, Kristeva).

1. Language features

The following features of language common to all communication are relevant to an analysis of chat by means of Reader-Response Theory will be discussed in this study: skills of shared language; linguistic skills; knowledge of the world skills and metalinguistic knowledge and skills. To be able to communicate effectively, one needs to have at least two of the four skills needed to share language; reading, writing, listening and speaking. There are other means of communication that can be used in person to person communication, such as body language, but the overt processes involved in language sharing, are some combination of these four.

1. CS 1.2.1 Skills of shared language

 

In text based chatrooms we take away the two skills of listening and speaking. We are left with reading and writing as the only means of sharing information. In this model, for an online shared language, I would equate ‘listening’ with reading and ‘speaking’ with writing. Reading and listening are the passive side of communication whilst writing and speaking are the active. We have to combine the reading and writing and understanding of symbols and abbreviations to correspond with the chatroom language. If people are using the same emoticons and abbreviations as others in the chatroom but they ascribe different meanings to them then the communication will fail. It has been noted that the links between reading and writing, for example, have been emphasized to such an extent that it is now normal to see them referred to as "literacy" (Wray & Medwell 1991, p. 3). It is not difficult to say the same thing about online communication. As chat-languages (this includes SMS Messaging) become more widely used they will be accept as online-literacy.

Each of the "four skills" of reading, writing, listening and speaking are composed of sub-skills according to, Grabe. I have adapted the following four skills necessary in order to create a meaning sphere from chatroom reading. These are: linguistic skills, knowledge and skills of discourse structure and organization, knowledge of the world and metalinguistic knowledge and skills

"Recent findings on language processing suggest that basic strategies focusing on the most important words in a text for example, and activating background schemata are the same in listening and reading..." (Danks & End (1985), Lund (1991). With the fast paced conversation in most chatrooms, if someone wrote a long text, others in the chatroom would not be able to read and grasp the whole text before dozens of new texts make the message disappear on the screen. Therefore, in an active chatroom with dozens of people speaking only the words which standout are noted. Below is an example of too many words and a response to it.

89. <SWMPTHNG> WHOSE GONNA SEND THEM CLIMBING ALL OVER EVERY HOUSE ON THE COAST SE HABLO ESPANOL

91. <guest-MisterD1> sigh...

Table 4-CS :8 Too many words

2. CS 1.2.2 Linguistic skills

 

In normal reading situations one is able to re-read a statement, passage, chapter or even a book to locate what the author is saying. In writing, even in emails, we can change what we wish to say, we can edit the conversation; there is a sense of control of what is conveyed. However, in chatrooms we seldom have the time to reread, let alone rewrite text. Are we to trust the words we read? What about the words we write? If we are in a conversation on the Internet, and we want to have an exchange of meaning, and our spelling and typing are a disaster, how do we say what we have to say? What linguistic skills do we need to communicate effectively on the Internet? I would venture to say we need very little, and the ability of one to communicate in a chatroom is not based on academic achievement, age, or command of language, but in the ability to cast a few words into cyberspace and to hope for the best understanding. Professors, as well as leading business people, make simple grammatical and spelling errors in emails and chatroom conversation, as do people who do not have a good command of the language the chatroom is in. The factors are many; one could be in a hurry, have a handicap which prevents a person from typing, a person could speak another language and be unfamiliar with the one he or she is currently typing. A person could have an excellent education and just not be a good typist. My doctor, for example, is a painful typist to watch and when she writes a report, she bangs at the keyboard, one letter at a time, taking time to find each letter. She went through university and medical school and is a good doctor who just never learnt to type, and a person meeting her in a chatroom would think they were conversing with someone who had very poor command of the English language. We also recognize that language has rules and we attempt to apply those rules. At some point in our language acquisition, we learn rules of sentence structure and word order. We learn how to use pronouns to replace noun phrases, or the order of adjectives before a noun or when to use plurals. In chatrooms we seem to pay little attention to rules of grammar. I investigate grammar in Case Study Six (CS 6.2.3) and will only mention this in passing as an illustrative point to how people communicate online.

In turn 174 <EMT-Calvin> writes,

174. thats whty i have such a peace in my heart tonigjt

Table 4-CS :9 Grammar errors

and in turn 174 <EMT-Calvin> writes,

214. i am one of the carteret county personal for ems and fire we evacuated the beach and barrior islands NEW SITE = JULY 2014 - http://neuage.us/2014/July/ - Today

Table 4-CS :10 Grammar OK

 

The two examples sound almost as if they could be two different people. Turn 174 is not particularly highly literate compared to turn 214, but there seems to be more accuracy in grammar and textual structure. It would take longer to write the 20 words in 214 than the 11 words in 173. Because we have no idea of what someone is doing when communicating in a chatroom, i.e. they could be doing any number of tasks, we can not know why one writes the way they do in a chatroom. We also learn various social aspects of language usage, such as when to use slang, to make racist or political statements, and when not to. For example, in turn 75, <SWMPTHNG> writes,

75. THERE'LL BE PLENTY OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N CAROLINA NEXT WEEK

Table 4-CS :11 Mexican roofers (begin)

There were no statements about Mexican roofers or anything to do with roofing prior to this utterance. Furthermore, <SWMPTHNG> had contributed four turns in the chat which I captured, and nothing implied that he would begin a conversation about Mexicans, with a racist tone, which involved several people. I discuss this further below. But one would believe that he or she was comfortable amongst friends, to be able to begin this thread. I discuss this more when I speak about the theorist, Holland, who takes the psychological approach, and says that we may infer what we communicate, with our individualized self.

We need to apply prior knowledge and experience when trying to make sense of utterances. The goal is not to understand words, per se, so much as to understand the ideas behind the words. Communicating in a chatroom is akin to learning a new language. I discuss this in the Introduction and the Discussion chapters to this thesis, when I write about learning to use emoticons and abbreviations.

The core of psychological understanding revolves around the notion of motive—desire, want, wish, reason. We understand an action when we know what motivated it. The motives for action are usually clear, since action itself usually indicates the motive that prompts it. Why am I paying money to the cashier in a supermarket? So that I can buy food and eventually eat it. We generally act in order to fulfill our manifest wishes. Sometimes the motives for action can be obscure, as when you see me searching frantically in a drawer and don't know that I left a lot of money in there and now can't find it. Motives are internal mental states that cause action and that make sense of actions; action is seen as rational in the light of motives that lead to it. We apply this reasoning to both the motivation for the ideas of a text as well as to the author's motive for writing that text.
(Colin McGinn, "Freud Under Analysis,"The New York Review, November 4, 1999, p. 20.)

 

The motivation for a text in a chatroom is not always known. Is the writer attempting to change the course of the dialogue, upset others who have a topic of discussion in process, sell something or use any of an array of tactics for a personal reason? Motivation can only be assumed. In the Hurricane Floyd chatroom the overriding motivation is to find out information on the whereabouts of the storm. Within that chat however, there are personal beliefs stated by several users that take the topic of the storm in a wider area. For example, even though the discussion is on the storm one chatter below shares his or her religious belief in regards to the storm and another opinions about Mexicans also in regards to the storm. Without reading the text there can not be a response that makes sense. Not only is reading the immediate text important but knowing the content of the text is needed to have a reader-response.

120. <KikoV> we got gun laws to deal with them.........

Table 4-CS :12 Gun laws (Roofers 2)

 

121. <EMT-Calvin> i have faith in jesus

Table 4-CS :13 Faith in 

1. Knowledge and skills of discourse structure and organization

 

Discourse structures refer to the skill in reading and writing which involves the analytical skills of determining the phonology, morphology and syntax of languages or the use of grammar. Discourse structures also study the interrelationship between language and society and this is discussed in the discussion chapter when I examine how, or if emoticons effect grammar in chatrooms.

2. Knowledge of the world

This is the knowledge of the world in which we live and are discussing in the chatroom. In this Case Study, the knowledge of the world is localized to concern with knowledge of the East Coast of the United States of America. Thought there are chatters who say they are from California and one from Canada, they are still knowledgeable about the storm. To be able to converse in a chatroom we need to be able to share topic matter and be part of the discourse which is happening in real time.

3. Metalinguistic knowledge and skills

 

Chatrooms are as close to being pre-literate as they are to being an advanced literate textual state. Language is broken down to its simplest rudimentary format. At the same time there is a certain advanced form of communication involved, when one is limited to a few words to state irony, belief structures or humour, as well as to have a command of enough emoticons and abbreviations to create meaningful interaction. Metalinguistic ability is the capacity to think about and talk about language of the function of language in referring to itself; cf. metalanguage which is called by Jakobson the 'metalingual' function.

In the ‘Reader-Response Theory’ critical approach, the primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author of the text. There are two basic theoretical assumptions in Reader-Response Theory: The first is that each reading is a performance, similar to performing a musical work, etc. The text exists only when it is read giving rise to meaning, which in this case, becomes an event. The second assumption is, that the literary text has no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one "correct" meaning. Textual meaning and value are "transactional," "dialogic," created by the interaction of the reader and the text.

There are many reasons a person may be in a chatroom and this determines how the text is read. For example,

Pleasure identification,

95. <KBabe1974> i agree with emt calvin

Table 4-CS :14 Identification with

Information seeking,

86. <lookout4110> Have the winds been strong?

Table 4-CS :15 Information seeking

Figure CS1.24

Looking for companionship,

195. <ankash> ImFLOYD would you like to chat privately?

Table 4-CS :16 Companionship seeking

And personal beliefs,

120. <KikoV> we got gun laws to deal with them.........

Table 4-CS :17 Beliefs (Gun laws - see CS 1:8)

and

158 <EMTCalvin> i have faith in jesus

Table 4-CS :18 Faith in (see CS 1:9)

 

We can also see chatroom turn taking as a transaction, much as Louis Rosenblatt did with her transactional theory model for literary analysis. In Literature as Exploration (1937) she saw reading as a transaction between reader and text. To say the same thing as many of the other proponents of Reading-Response theory say, she wrote that, meaning is as dependent upon the reader as it is dependent upon the text. There is no universal, absolute interpretation of a poem; rather, there can be several probable interpretations, depending in part upon what the reader brings to the text. In other words for Rosenblatt, the reader is not passive. This is obviously the case in chatrooms where the reader shows his or her assertiveness through writing a response to an earlier text, or by submitting a statement, opinion or question to the chatroom.

<xx> "Um what exactly does Holland mean when he says 'The self is a text?'" <paul> – nothing really but he signifies a bunch

Table 4-CS :19 'The self is a text?...

 Holland has identified three major signs of regression on the Internet; "flaming," sexual harassment and "identity play". However, I could not find anywhere in his writings of a writer’s response to their reading as it is in chatrooms. For example in Table 1, I have plotted a dialogue between, <ankash> and <mahmoo> where <mahmoo> responds to <ankash> by username with a solicited utterance. <ankash> responds in turn and that is the only interaction between these two in the hundreds of turn-takings I recorded in this chatroom.

Turn	Speaker	Utterance
65	<ankash>	Jersey knows, my sis lives there and she is out of school tomorrow, she is a teacher.
79	<mahmoo>/\65	ankash, i'm glad to know they're aware, not a frequent weather occurence for them
86	<ankash>/\79	Yes, mahmoo, I hope they take it seriously

Table 4-CS :20 <mahmoo> responds to <ankash>

Using Holland as a source for ‘Reading Theory’ in chatrooms does not seem to be favourable, as we can not identify, at least in the sequences of chat I ‘captured’ in this chatroom, what the psychological profile of either the writer, <ankash> in turn 65, or the reader of <ankash> is. <mahmoo>, in turn 79, becomes the writer and is read by <ankash> who then becomes the writer in response to <mahmoo>. There are many theorists (Jakobson, Kristeva, Iser), who have written and offered diagrams of how we read and respond. They chart messages as shown below, with the third row being a chatroom response.

Addresser Context		Context Message Contact Code		Addressee
Writer		Context writing Code		Reader
Writer Reader		Writing Code (abbreviations, emoticons) words		Reader Addressee Writer lurker

 

Essentially, every response the person writes in the chatroom is influenced by previous utterances in the chatroom that she or he has read, and the reader's own cultural context. The simplest articulation of intertextuality can be seen in the footnotes that indicate source materials to which a given text is alluding, or which are known to have influenced the author. A constructive hypertext can make this notion of intertextuality an externally accessible "mosaic" of multiple texts, placing the internal connections about which Kristeva theorizes into a visible forum that can be expanded by each subsequent reader.

Footnoting is an impossible task in a chatroom because of the rapidity of textual entrants. However, there can be intertextuality in a chatroom, with one providing their email address, or a link to a site on the Internet. In MUDs and in some chatrooms now, sound is added and participants add images to represent themselves. There is no example of intertextuality of this type in this chatroom, Case Study One, but in chatrooms where there is, the reading of the text would take on new significance. I do not include multimedia in the chatroom as part of the interpretation of the chat text in this thesis as I am only dealing with, here, in ‘text only’ chatrooms. However, I believe that a chatroom with multimedia would have one of two effects on the conversation. Firstly, text, plus images and sound, could cause some chaos, and the textual message could easily become lost. Secondly, the converse, the multimedia could enhance the textual message and make it clearer. This would make a good further research project.

As I show in Case Study 2, where I discuss Instant Messenger chatroom types where there are only two ‘voices’ present, even with only two people there is often a chaos of turn taking involved. There is the seemingly continuous battle between writer and reader, whether there are two participants, or twenty. It can be a logistical problem to track who is talking to whom. There can often be dozens of turns between one chatter speaking then responding to what someone had said in response to what they had originally had written. And within that space there may be others who have joined in the dialogue. Like Kristeva, I am interested in the intertextuality of chatrooms, and as multimedia becomes more accessible to chatrooms, the dynamics of chat will become a richer field of meaning generating by participants.

Stanley Fish, like Wolfgang Iser, focuses on how readers adjust to the text. Fish is interested in the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words of sentences as they follow one another in time. This perspective is useful for an analysis of chatroom talk in many ways. One is where the writer, usually through pushing the return or enter key on the keyboard by mistake, says only half of what they had intended to say, and the remainder of their utterance appears several turns later.   For example,

Turn 275 <IMFLOYD> i've got a sister........want to see

Turn 278 <IMFLOYD> her she is again

Table 4-CS :22 Enter key mishap

In a sex chatroom, turn 275 would have gotten a different response than here, where no one commented. Reading this text I would think that <IMFLOYD> is saying he is concerned about seeing his sister. Knowing this is a chatroom about a hurricane we would assume <IMFLOYD> is hoping to see the sister because the storm may have a bad effect on her.

4. Phenomenological approach to reading

The phenomenological method focuses on what happens in the reader's mind as he or she reads (Iser, Fish, Holland). Fish defines his own phenomenological approach as "an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time." This could accurately be applied to real time written-reader response in a medium such as a chatroom or SMS messages on a mobile (cell) phone. By using a number of textual techniques to lead the reader in a chatroom into a false sense of security, a writer will often effect a turn from the reader's expectations of what should be or what is said in order to influence the reader with a directional change. In chatrooms this change can drag several others along. My example of this in Case Study One is where the speaker <SWMPTHNG> begins to speak about Mexican roofers in a negative way in turn 75,

THERE'LL BE PLENTY OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N CAROLINA NEXT WEEK

Table 4 CS :23 Mexican roofers statement (see CS :24)

which leads <EMT-Calvin> in turn number 82 to say

and those folks will be sent back to mexico.

Table 4 CS :25 sent back to mexico

During this exchange, with the topic being begun by <SWMPTHNG>, six other people added comments. There were a total of 23 speakers during the turn taking between 75 and 130 (see table 5 in Appendix One) with seven, 30 percent, being part of this thread regarding Mexican roofers. This dialogue was 20 percent of the chat during this time. How <SWMPTHNG> lead close to one-third of the chatters to follow his/her views is similar to how topics are changed and people follow in face-to-face conversation. In Case Study four, where I look at chatroom talk using Conversational Analysis I discuss more on turn taking in conversation using the work on CA by, Slade and Eggins (1997), John Austin (1962), Robert Nofsinger (1991), H Sacks (1974), E. Schegloff (1974), and Deborah Tannen (1989).

In phenomenology, speech (the particular signifying act) precedes writing (the field of signifying possibility), however in a chatroom, speech becomes the written text and therefore, writing is always a signifying act at the same time as it is filled with signifying possibilities, i.e. one can do respond in any number of ways.

"The phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that, in considering the literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text" (Iser 1978, p. 43)

 

2. CS 1.3 Discussion

"The reader is left with everything to do, yet everything has already been done; the work only exists precisely on the level of his abilities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he could always create more profoundly; and this is why the work appears to him as inexhaustible and as impenetrable as an object." (Sartre, What is Literature (1949, p. 176).

 

1. CS 1.3.1 Two readings of a chatroom
1. Chat title

There are two readings a participant takes in understanding meaning within a chatroom. Firstly, the title of the chatroom is read. Chatrooms are divided into what could be closely referred to as communities and within the communities there are further divisions or rooms. This is like being in a section of a city that appeals to us. Chat servers are large entities with many areas for people to engage in chat in. For example, TalkCity.com is one of the larger chat servers and it has divided its services into three areas. TalkCity reports more than 10,000 chat sessions a month, and with over 5 million active participants each month it can be seen as a city. There are rooms for any topic imaginable and my purpose to visit the various rooms within the TalkCity arena was to get a ‘feel’ for the variety of conversations in different rooms in hopes to find whether the chatters carried on conversations which were reflective of the chatroom title. Then I will return to the chatroom I am using for this case study to compare whether an emergency chatroom has the same reading as a general chatroom.

I was unable to ‘capture’ dialogue in TalkCity as their rooms appear in java applets, which will not allow cutting or copying and pasting. My comments therefore, will not discuss actual text as I do in the chatrooms in this and other case studies, but instead give a general overview to identify whether there is turn taking as described in the individual case studies. The six TalkCity rooms I visited were; dealing-with-disability, I checked into this room on several occasions and there was no one in it. The time of day I visited was between 9 AM and Noon Australian time which meant the middle of the night in the United States of America. There was a set topic, ‘Showing we care’, but as there was no one to chat with I moved on to the next room, which was, diddling-n-doodling and no one was in the room and there was no one in the flippinchicks room either. In the chatroom, !massachusetts_flirts there were 21 visitors. In this chatroom there was a lot of ‘talk’ with no more than the usual chatroom greetings, ‘hi’, and people enquiring whether there were ‘any females who want cybersex’. There were a few statements, such as ‘I will never eat McDonalds again’, with no follow up, even by the same person. It seemed in this chatroom people were just passing time with out an obvious purpose to communicate. This is one of the features of chatrooms, which makes it a new genre of engagement. It is unusual in other forms of conversation, such as person to person at a public gathering for everyone to continuously to say hello and to ask if anyone wants to talk.

married-lonely-hearts; No one in the room.

not-necessarily married; had five participants. I said I was doing a PhD on ‘Conversational analysis of chatrooms’ – The five people already in the room carried on dialogue on what I was doing a PhD on for about half an hour. It became a very question and answer chat and shows that whatever was being discussed in a chatroom can be changed. Of course, I don’t know what was previously said, but for the approximately 200 turn takings I was involved in questions and answers which were almost sequential. Someone would ask a question, and I would answer.

!sexy-adults-who-arent-shy; had seven participants – everyone wrote in something to the effect of ‘neuage are you a male or female?’

 Chatropolis, (http://www.chatropolis.com/whochat/x.html,) had 1684 users when I visited. Chatropolis has a lot of specific areas (Cybersex, Image Exchange, Alternative Lifestyle, Vampires, Bondage, S&M, Fetish, Gorean Lifestyle, Role Playing and Bars), each with many rooms such as Cybersex which has rooms as [Analopolis ‘Anal Sex Chat’], [Bed & Breakfast ‘General Chat’], [Bits of Tits ’Breast Chat’], [Five Knuckle Shuffle ‘Masturbation’], [Gang Bang ’Cyber Sex’] and [Hairless and Horny ‘Shaved Smooth’]. Like TalkCity above there are many rooms catering to whatever anyone fancies. The dialogue to the right was cut and pasted from one of the rooms (observing more than a dozen rooms the talk was basically the same as this dialogue with little variation. In all these chatrooms there are a lot of photos posted, primarily of females in various undress situations.

What I found from visiting the above chatrooms and only staying for approximately twenty-turns in those that had anyone in them, was that in the rooms that had visitors they would ‘talk’ about what the title of the chatroom was. I explore this more in Case Study two when I use a pop-celebrity, Britney Spears to explore whether people in a room focus on the topic of that room.

1. Reading reader as author

Aspects of the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking must be present for effective communication, and I have related these to chatroom talk in this case study. I have identified two features that are important to chatroom conversation, both illustrating the importance of a Reader-Response Method of analysis. As with most readings, i.e print articles and books and online journals with the title and the body of the writing needing to be read before there can be a response, so there are two reading processes involved in chatroom discourse which any participant in a chatroom must use to share in conversation. Firstly, there is the title of the chatroom; a person must decide from the title whether this chatroom is what they are seeking. Secondly, there is the actual chat- text; before one can respond to what is being ‘said’ in a chatroom he or she must first read the text of other chatters.

2. Chat text

Secondly, there is the reading of the text written before one enters their own entrances. I believe that Reading Response Theory is important for the interpretation of the text in the chatroom. For my first question, Is the Reader the Writer who is writing the reader J ? to be answered, the ‘reader’ and the ‘writer’ need to have a method by which to interpret what has been written and what has been read.

Before anything can be understood in a chatroom what is being said needs first to be read. There are two readings available within chatrooms that are important to guide a person who is new in a room. Firstly, is the title of conversation of the chatroom if there is one. The title of a chatroom is what often draws one to a chatroom. However, unlike a title of an article or a book which gives an indication of what the subject matter is, the title of a chatroom may not be what the chat is about. For example, in case study 3 the title of the chatroom is ‘Britney Spears Chatroom’. But in the 70 lines I ‘captured’ there was only one mention of Spears, in line 39,

39. <Joypeters> hello.....is.the real brittany spears on line

Table 4 CS :26 Britney Spears CS 3

Therefore this title was misleading, or there could have been discussion of Britney Spears for days and the few lines I captured had nothing to do with her.

The second is the reading of the first few lines seen when the chatroom is first entered.

Everyone who enters a chatroom has an agenda or reason to be there. It could be because they want to be part of an online community, or they want to experiment with a persona or with writing styles or share or gather information. Because we do not actually see the person we do not know anything more about them than he or she decides to reveal to others. Even what one reveals about her or his selves can be different than what actually is going on in their real-life. For example, a person in grief could appear as one who is happy or one who has an illegal intent may appear friendly in order to obtain another user’s address or credit card number. Developing an interpretation of what another person is saying requires being very conscious of several processes in reading. In a chatroom there are multiple interpretive possibilities of what is being written. Before there can be a response in a chatroom an earlier written text needs to be read. One can enter a chatroom and just write but if what others have said is not read, then the writing becomes a series of letters and emoticons which have no function other than to float across another reader’s screen.

What can change the reading of the text in the chatroom is the reading of the title of the chatroom. If it is a baseball chatroom or a sex-change chatroom or one with a title of ‘Marxist Chatroom’, we would assume that the subject matter of the chat would be focused on the title. In my first chatroom I ‘captured’ the discourse of a chatroom that was on Hurricane Floyd, which occurred in the Eastern United States in 1999. When I entered the chatroom I pasted in my statement, which the ethics committee at the University of South Australia requested that I make before saving any dialogue in a chatroom for research.

<Neuage> ‘I am saving this dialogue, as long as I am in this room, to use in research on Internet Chat for a postgraduate degree. If anyone is opposed to me saving their conversation say so and I will not save the chat’.

Table 4 CS :27 Terrell statement

The first utterance I saw after submitting my above statement was;

3. <EMT-Calvin> hahahaha lol

Table 4 CS :28 Response to Terrell statement?

How should this be read? Is the first question one would need to answer. Was this chatter commenting on my statement about saving chatroom dialogue or is [hahahaha lol] in response to something said earlier is unknown. Chatrooms are discourses already in process and so one is entering into a conversation. What is read is not necessarily what is being said. The same problem would occur if we were to begin reading any text at random in a book or other text from another source. Until more is read one cannot correctly enter into discourse. The next few lines clarify that this chatroom discussion is about the hurricane.

4. <TIFFTIFF18> DO U MOW IF ITS GONNA HIE JERSEY AT ALL

5. <Werblessed> Where your hous thilling

6. <Kitteigh-Jo> near Princeton

7. <RUSSL1> right over my place

8. <ankash> New Jersy in under Tropical Storm Watch now Right?

Table 4 CS :29 Five turns re. Storm

Listing the first few lines I ‘captured’ from each chatroom may give an indication of what is being discussed at the time. Along with the reading of the title to the chatroom, the reading of the first few utterances one sees in a chatroom, determines how the new participant will respond. Because most text-based chatrooms are already conversation in progress the first lines seen are rarely the starting point of the chat.

Case Study Three is the Britney Spears chatroom. The dialogue at the time of my entrance is simple and it continues for 70 more turn-takings with little more thank two or three words or an abbreviation being said. In this case the discourse was not on the music singer Britney Spears though the room was named after her. This was a chat one would expect in a very general non-topic-specific (NTS) chatroom.

1. <SluGGiE-> lol

2. <Mickey_P_IsMine> LoL

Table 4 CS :30 First lines in Case Study 3

Case Study Four is titled ‘Astrology Chatroom’ so we would expect to find a discourse on astrology occurring here. In the first two lines I read this was the case.

1. <gina2b> everyones a know it all!

2. <dingo42> nicole wahts your sign ??

Table 4 CS :31 First lines in Case Study 4

For Case Study Five I chose a room at random from one of the thousands of rooms available on the TalkCity.com chat site, it was simply called ‘room #50. The lines I first read upon entry confirmed this may be a non-topic-specific chatroom.

1. <tab_002> HI nice to see you too Jennv :)))))))

2. <Leesa39> ooooo my sweetie jake is angry

Table 4 CS :32 First lines in Case Study 5

I chose a software development site chatroom for Case Study Six because I wanted to use a topic specific chat from a moderated chatroom. In this case study it was not until turn ten that the topic of software was brought up. The nine turns before were greetings and unrelated utterances to the topic of the chatroom. In turn ten and eleven is the beginning of the chat on 3D animation which continued for five-hundred more turns.

10. <web3dADM> just got the Cult3D folks to agree to show up on March 3

11. <Justin> what's cult3d

Table 4 CS :33 First lines in Case Study 6

And for Case Study 7 I have used a chatroom on baseball and not only are the usernames related to baseball but the statements are about baseball teams:

4. <BLUERHINO11> sox beat the tribe

5. <NMMprod> Nop

6. <MLB-LADY> no clev fan but like wright

Table 4 CS :34 First lines in Case Study 7

Two other chatrooms I have mentioned in my case studies also reveal that right from the time I entered the chatroom it was clear what the conversation was about.

<Latexena> she does have nice tata's

<Zeedo> ever see what goes on in a slaughter house

Table 4 CS :35 First lines in bondage chatroom

<Cupid's Sister> Dolly.....Nowhere that's just how I am.....I prayed hard to God for my father to recover....but God took him and now my father is in heaven

Table 4 CS :36 First lines in christian chatroom

Whereas turn-taking is thought of primarily as a two-part turn taking system, in chatrooms there are so many voices that actual individual turn-taking has to be teased out to find meaning in dialogue and to discover who is speaking. For example, in the multilogue in this chatroom, the text in 73 is not answered until 83.

73.	<lookout4110>	How ya holding up Werblessed?
83.	<Werblessed>	So far just strong wind gusts and lots of rain.. Over 8 inches so far..

Table 4 CS :37 73 is not answered until 83

See Appendix table 9, for the ten turn takings between.

I refer to these gaps between responses as Chatter’s-Event-Response Gaps (CERG). In Figure CS1.4 there are ten other turns involving eight chatters, which discuss other issues. <Werblessed> having read <lookout4110>’s utterance, and perhaps the ten in between, chose to answer <lookout4110> and not anyone else. This could be because <Werblessed> was named in turn 73 and in the 282 turn-takings I ‘captured’, only two other times was <Werblessed> addressed and that was later in the chat dialogue in turn 101 and turn 102.

101. <ger3355> where is that at werblessed?

102. <guest-mandy> /\96 werblessed where are you

Table 4 CS :38 Utterance to...

There are eight individuals between this question and answer, yet, as is often the case in chatrooms, we can find dialogue. How does this happen? Without reading the text as it rapidly scrolls by, there cannot be an answer. This is an easy example to follow. Often there will be dozens of turns, with dozens of speakers, and no one is addressed, yet there is a turn taking, and a conversation develops between two or more individuals in the midst of a more general conversation.

Two ways in which chatters can identify whether to respond to the writing by someone else is firstly if he or she is addressed directly such as <Werblessed> is here. Secondly, the chatter may choose to respond by deciding whether or not the topic may signify him or her or having meaning to him or her, i.e.

223. <guest-MoreheadCityNC> Worried, who's worried?

224. <guest-ohNO> i am:)

Table 4 CS :39 Answer un-named

1. Three Hurricane Floyd discourses

I have saved three approaches of online communication for this case study to illustrate how chatroom ‘talk’ differs from other Internet based conversations. The first is a bulletin board of one-way communication where people were able to leave messages for others in the ‘1999 Message Line of World Wide Inquires Lost and Found Hurricane Floyd Review’. An example from this communication shows that the writers are not engaged in real-time conversation, i.e. there is a day in between the correspondence, but they are leaving messages to describe their situation^,

09-14-99     09-15-99 - 11:23 AM

Graham,D East Bay St., Charleston, SC   Greene,G Effingham, SC

Gone to Atlanta, am fine  I will call; cell phone dead. Went by and picked up Betsy. Am fine, hatches battened out, going to Mother's

Table 4CS :40 Storm bulletin board

The second online message shows the difference between a chatroom correspondence as in Figure CS1.31 and a text which may have been planned before sending online. This was on the Hurricane Floyd Messages board,

By <wpapas> on Monday, September 13, 1999 - 08:45 am:

Significant safety concerns for family, friends, and property on San Salvador, Rum Key, Turks & Cacos. If anyone is on line there Please post to messaging board, I know there are those monitoring short wave radio on San Salvador; Please radio The "Pitts" Sandra & Nick on San Salvador and forward any request or messages. There was very little news before after and during Dennis. Sincerely. Wp

Table 4 CS :41 Hurricane Floyd Messages board

48. <ankash> Tornadoes in Pender Count

Table 4 CS :42 Floyd chatroom

The difference between a text-based chatroom and the bulletin board and message board above is shown in the immediacy and shortness of statements in the chatroom. There is little reader response time to what is said in a text-based chat and word usage to transfer meaning must be short and understandable by others in the room. Often there is not an expected immediate response with bulletin board or email messages, as the one or others addressed may not be online.

The role of the reader in a chatoom is usually to become the writer of a text. If the person is only an observer or lurker, then the role of the reader can be any number of factors. The reader could be the researcher, investigating how people talk in chatrooms. The reader could be one who wishes to learn about something. For example, I was interested in the Storm chatroom even though I am living in South Australia because I am from the East Coast of the United States originally and I wanted to have a feeling for what was going on there.

When one participates in a chatroom, strategies must come into play in order that the reader may find meaning not only in the words, with their misspellings and often improper grammar, but also in the use of emotions and abbreviations.

One of the features of ‘Reception and Reader-Response Theory’ as I am using it in chatrooms is that it shows how a reader brings certain assumptions to a text based on the interpretive strategies he/she has brought to a particular community. The community here is the Internet community and every chatroom is an individual textual based social community. Interpretation of the text will depend on the perceived purpose or dynamics or sphere of the chatroom community. The ‘talk’ within a community can at times be ‘policed’ by others within the chatroom. For example, a ‘speaker’ maybe harassed into either conforming or leaving a chatroom if their talk is inappropriate for that room.

A mild form of this is present in the lines I have been working with in this first section. The ‘speaker’, <SWMPTHNG> in turns 105 and 115 is starting a process of getting the chatroom interested in talking about Mexican roofers. The ‘speaker’ <Zardiw> in turn 123 makes a short sharp comment to let <SWMPTHNG> know that his/her line of dialogue are not necessarily appropriate. Of course this is a very mild rebuttal compared to when several participators push a person out. An example of this can be found in a chatroom where a voice appearing as a rude-male has entered and is harassing a room of females who do not want the male impute. Then the voices become more harsh and attack the ‘intruder’ until he leaves.

105 <SWMPTHNG> YOU AINT TALKING ABOUT MEX ROOFERS ARE YOU?

115 <SWMPTHNG> i SAW A BUS LOAD HEADING ACROSS THE GEORGIA STATE LINE THIS MORNING

123 <Zardiw> smptthing................go back to your SWAMP

Table 4 CS :43 Annoyed response

Reader-Response Theory applied in a chatroom moves conversation into a new genre of textual response; a metaphysical-chat-linguistics, where what is said is heard by both the hearer and the speaker at the same instance. Metaphysical-chat-linguistics is anticipating what will be said before the completion of the utterance, either due to the writer-speaker hitting the ‘enter’ key on the keyboard or the chat server not allowing more than a couple of lines at a time to be shown on the screen, thus breaking the conversation before it is completed.

3. CS 1.4 Answers

 

1. CS 1.4.1 The Reader is the writer who is writing the reader J