Conversational Analysis of Chat Room Talk PHD thesis by Dr. Terrell Neuage University of South Australia National Library of Australia.
THESIShome ~ Abstract.html/pdf ~ Glossary.html/pdf ~ Introduction.html/pdf ~ methodology.html/pdf ~ literature review.html/pdf ~ Case
Study 1.html/pdf~ 2.html/pdf~ 3.html/pdf~ 4.html/pdf~ 5.html/pdf~ 6.html/pdf~ 7.html/pdf~ discussion.html/pdf ~ conclusion.html~ postscipt.html/pdf~ O*D*A*M.html/pdf~ Bibliography.html/pdf~ 911~ thesis-complete.htm/~ Terrell Neuage Home
In the first instance my task within each research frame was to examine what each particular methodology could capture and describe within the talk-text as data. Only then could I begin to detect directions within these accumulating sets of features, and so to hypothesise that on-line chat had recurrent or characteristic behaviours and selective techniques, which, while varying across the types of chat sites examined, tended towards the establishment of recognizable “on-line chat” linguistic strategies. By summarizing the most explicit findings in each study, I can now move to compare the seven studies, adding where appropriate observations from five supplementary chatroom studies[1], to show features common to all text-based chat, and generalisable as the “core” discursive modes of Internet chat.
Despite their often
incommensurable focus, the range of the theoretical methods used for analysis
revealed particular communication features common to all chatrooms. Most of
these features are not part of person-to-person off-line talk, and many appear
unique to text-based electronic dialogue - although there is evidence that some
of these behaviours occur in related
Returning to the five
assumptions, drawn from the
·
That language used in chat rooms
is more deliberate and calculated than the predominantly “informal” styles
might suggest.
·
That conversation within
Chatrooms demands a highly sensitized “reading” of texted-talk gambits from participants.
·
That “chat” does not differ from
natural conversation in certain key aspects, but does so in others.
·
That observational study of
chatroom conversation can capture adaptations to conversational behaviours.
·
That such work gives a better understanding of how, and why,
chatrooms are an important area in which to extend current conversational
research theory.
Each case study had three components useful in bringing about such conclusions for chatroom analysis.
Firstly, the linguistic theory and its associated methodology identified key aspects relating to how each text-based set of chat data “worked”.
Secondly, each case study identified features of conversation that were unique to both text-based chatrooms, and to the varying types and functions of such spaces.
Thirdly each case study allowed for the analysis of recurring or “typical” chatroom behaviours, demonstrating elements of communicative activity specific to the theory driving that particular case study. In other words, both general and specialised features were pursued in each case study.
The primary discoveries in each case study together provided a map of IRC, in both general and specific terms, across a broad spectrum of exemplar behaviours, at least during the sample period, and most likely beyond.
Case Study One based its analysis on Reader-response theory
to show that in on-line chat, both the person writing and the one (or many)
reading are co-language-meaning creators. Chatrooms were revealed as an active
reading environment where the “reader is left with everything to do…” (Sartre,
1949, p. 176). In order to engage in
conversation the “speaker-writer” first needs to be a “listener-reader”. Yet,
as with all Reader-Response research, chat-texts captured for this study
illustrated ongoing tensions for users, in relation to the issue of “closure”,
or certainty in interpretation. What is left open in chatrooms – more so than
in person-to-person conversation - is what later Reader-Response commentators
called “preferred readings”: techniques whereby texts are arranged to position
readers to receive and interpret them in certain ways which optimize selected
understandings and suppress others. Such
texts may construct within themselves “an inscribed reader”, or such a figure
and its attendant roles may emerge in “interpretative communities” (
Using Reader-Response theory to examine chat in a community of users checking progress of an extreme weather-alert emergency, I found that there are two moments of “reading” that a chat participant carries out in seeking to understand meaning within a chatroom, even before beginning to read the actual utterances of the other chatters. In person-to-person conversation early “readings” of an interlocutor, taken even before we listen to what he or she says, involve viewing the person, their appearance, their posture, body language and the environment (see Richmond and McCroskey, 1995; Ong, 1993; Goffman, 1981). Similar work is clearly undertaken in on-line chat.
In chatrooms, firstly, the
title of the chatroom is read. Case Study One showed that chatters carried on
conversations reflective of the chatroom title, Hurricane Floyd. In other Case
Studies with clearly designated topic-related titles I found the same reading
techniques used. Speakers tended to
converse about the topic established by the chatroom title. In chatrooms the
reader’s response fits the chatroom milieu.
A new utterance may begin a new thread, but there too the response is
dependent on the reading. For example in Case Study One turn 107,
<SWMPTHNG> inquires <YOU AINT TALKING ABOUT MEX ROOFERS
|
Thread |
Example |
Number of turns in thread |
|
Storm thread |
Turn4 <TIFFTIFF18> DO U MOW IF ITS
GONNA HIE |
254 |
|
Mexican thread |
Turn77 <SWMPTHNG> THERE'LL BE PLENTY
OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N CAROLINA |
14 |
|
Personal thread |
Turn189 <guest-Beau> Calvin, your last name wouldn't be Graham would it |
7 |
|
Chocolate thread |
Turn15 <mahmoo> brb.......gotta go get me some chocolate |
6 |
|
Other |
Turn215 <guest-Capt> VIAGRA |
6 |
Reader-response theory takes us further however than just the recognition that topic controls most of the dominant conversational thread-construction. Here, I found that the “writerly-writer” or actively constructing text-talker who initiates a conversational thread, and the “writerly-reader” who responds, are able to move the chat into new avenues, not simply responding in topic-compliant ways to developing conversations, but demonstrating especially “open” and “active” strategies of initiating text and responding to it. The talk remains topic centred, yet works to focus and refocus threads around certain aspects or themes of a topic. This is not just information provision, but creative exchange build around information sharing.
Chat entrants anticipate certain content and behaviours, focused around the chatroom title – but also display tendencies towards adapting rapidly as topic focus shifts and new threads develop, and even a capacity to shift off topic, especially into personalized referential chat. One of the features of reader-response theory as I am using it in chatrooms is thus 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, from other social-cultural contexts (see Gass, Neu, and Joyce, 1995; Blum-Kulka, Kasper, Gabriele, 1989; Rheingold, 1994; Turkle, 1995). The racial tone in Case Study One, displayed toward Mexican roofers, is an example of this. Reader-Response analysis thus reveals inside chat the sort of active, meaning-generating participants considered central in postmodern consumer culture (Lury, 1996; Castells, 1997, 2000). Even where the topic-shifts and socio-cultural attitudes may be directed to conservative or reactionary positions, the claims on reflexive use of communicative technologies and transformational interventions on communicative texts demonstrate Castells’ hypothesis, that the new communicative technologies are necessary to the “project identity” strategies of the postmodern condition. IRC becomes not a trivial pastime, but a key location for social and cultural formation.
How important is the particular chatroom context for the reader-writer interpretive relation?
It is the title of the
chatroom that I suggest lures a participant to a particular chatroom. In Case
Study One it was the topic of Hurricane Floyd. In Case Study Seven it is
baseball and in Case Study Three the title of the chatroom indicates that chat
will focus around the pop idol Britney Spears – although in this case, as the
analysis suggests, talk focused more into a Britney Spears form of style
culture than into direct discussion of the ostensible topic. It appears then that despite the title as
indicator, the chatter has to deal with multiple frames of interpretation,
assessing the motivations and attitudes of others in the room. When in turn 105 of Case Study One
<SWMPTHNG> asks <YOU AINT TALKING ABOUT MEX ROOFERS
The chatroom as context appears then to pre-position its users to expect and enact certain behaviours, values and topics. But since this appears to be only partially established through the title and topic selections, chatters also display complex techniques for both signalling and reading back rather less directly expressed aspects of the social and cultural framings brought to the chat. Context is generated in both chat space and real space – and these may or may not align. To this extent it becomes necessary to assess the contribution of the technologisation of chat to its cultural contextual framings, and to take up the findings of Case Study 2.
Case Study Two examines
on-line chat as a form of Computer-Mediated Communication (
The many tools available for
To some extent the impacts of
Synchronous
Three terms, “gap”, “lapse”
and “pause” are used to refer to silences in CA[2]. In chatrooms however, there will never be silences in the proper
sense of the word, let alone with the specificity and distinguishability of CA
analysis. If there are silences in real
time, the text will simply scroll together to cover these spaces. The
It is also important to locate techniques which will allow analysis of the differences in communicative responses between various Internet communication devices. In discussion groups and e-mails people observably take more time and care with what they write, and are therefore not as immediate in their communication as in Instant Messenger (IM) or chatroom conversations. Users of discussion groups and e-mail may use a spell/grammar check, and plan more consciously before posting their text. There is for instance a more textual format with discussion groups. But while Instant Messenger and chatrooms appear at first sight to be less disciplined and more varied, with the relative spontaneity of casual interchange ignoring many more formal communicative conventions, analysis has shown complex patterns of interpretive and pre-dispositional structuring under way. Messages from the Hurricane Floyd Messages Board, for instance appear more developed textually than the storm-related chatroom utterances – but is this an absolute, or a relative judgement? While IRC postings are far less grammatically formal, they remain as communicatively active and complex.
It is of course possible to postulate that, in the absence of directly
reciprocating co-locutors, postings must address an unknown and general audience,
in their quest for the specific addressee – and thus the more formalized and
“public” mode of expression. In an Instant Messenger chatroom, the contrary is
true. Interlocutors – most often established acquaintances, or at least those
who are able to establish cultural commonality within the immediate
communicative context – form responsive exchanges through their readings of
informal, yet nevertheless complex and sophisticated talk-texting repertoires.
I approached this case study
with two questions related to Computer-mediated communication: “Do computers
change conversation” and “Are Instant Messenger chatrooms closer to
off-line-person-to-person conversation than dialogue in a multivoiced chatroom?” It has certainly become obvious that
computers do change conversation, and especially in relation to the suppression
of paralinguistic cues, direct address carried by gaze or gesture, tonal
emphasis … all of those techniques used in “live” communication to manage the
conversational relation. While we have found many emerging
Yet in Instant Messenger or
any two-person-only chatroom there is more opportunity for an organized and
familiar turn-taking within communication, and therefore a more immediately
meaningful exchange, than in a multi-person chatroom. So how then might the
multi-person communicative repertoires of IRC be examined, to assess how
participants “manage” the complexities of their flows of talk? Which tools can
be used to assess techniques in use by IRC users, to overcome problems posed by
In Case Study Three, using
semiotic and pragmatic analysis as my tools of investigation of on-line chat, I
particularly wanted to uncover not just how “talk” is accomplished in a
chatroom, but how far chatroom “talk” generally may be said to include a
broader than usual repertoire of representation, working to “manage” talk
relation problems as outlined above, and to compensate the loss of off-line
conversational cues. Mihai
Nadin (1977) claims that the computer is in itself a semiotic machine, as it is
at core a machine that can be programmed to manipulate symbols. Using computers themselves as semiotic generators has an aesthetic
appeal to users, because semiotic codes change over time and provide new
meanings to old ideas. This seems interestingly close to the sorts of marked
creativity the IRC and IM users in particular display in the case studies for
this research – although the continuity of these creative “solutions” will communicational
problems on-line, with strategies and talk/texting techniques evolved in
off-line conversation and reading-writing practices, reduces the implied
suggestions that it is the
In this case study I focused on the most
obvious of the
I chose a chatroom named after a celebrity to firstly discover whether usernames, their “identity” sign-tags, would be reflective of the title of the chatroom. In this case study on “Britney Spears Chat” one chatter did indeed identify as a Britney fan: <baby_britney1>. This identification with the chat-title is consistent with what I have found in the other chatrooms in this thesis, such as in Case Study One, Hurricane Floyd, where there was the username <IMFLOYD>. In Case Study Four on astrology participants used the names “astrochat”, <AquarianBlue>, <TheGods> and <Night-Goddess_>; in Case Study Six, “web 3d animation” there were <web3dADM> and < Web3DCEO)> and in Case Study Seven, “baseball chat” <MLB-LADY> (major league baseball). Therefore it is evident that usernames can be directly associated with the name-directed topic of the chatroom. When the dialogue is read from the postings of these specific users it is clear that each chatter is indeed interested in the topic of the chatroom:
<AquarianBlue> in Case Study Four;
|
10). <AquarianBlue> Nicole 528 is gemini |
<web3dADM> in Case Study Six;
|
10) <web3dADM> just got the Cult3D folks to agree to show up on March 3 |
<MLBLADY> in Case Study Seven;
|
6. <MLBLADY> no clev fan but like wright |
But in each of these chatrooms there are also participants, as we saw in
each study, identifying against or outside the title-topic convention;
contributing postings off-topic; playing with textual form rather than
following content threads – even resisting efforts to bring them back on topic.
And both within and off topic, we have seen intense moments of creative
communicative play, frequently directed more towards the maintenance of
communicative relations than to focused engagement with talk topics.
Case Study Two, let us note, centred on inquiry into whether the
“playfulness” of on-line chat is a
In Case Study Three to fully explore this drive to identity performance
and exploration, to find out how users extend the actual communicative range of
the “language” or coding system used, it was first necessary to examine which
communicative functions were actually in use in the Britney Spears chatroom,
and to reveal which are dominant and recurrent.
Firstly, it was obvious in this chatroom that chatters employed usernames
as signs to give others clues about their identity – or at least about their
“preferred identity”, or particular identification with a Britney community. In
person-to-person conversation the clues that are given as aspects of identity
are personal – indeed, physical. On-line, these are replaced by the sorts of
identity markers which demark off-line social or cultural status: one’s employment or educational level for
instance.
Here, in keeping with the Britney world, user tags are about image and
“claiming”, or the image that one wishes to have represent one’s status within
the particular social context of the Britney chat group. Each asserts either a
relational claim, or one’s desirability as a relational being: <Mickey_P_IsMine>, <JeRz-BaByGurL>, <Pretty_Jennifer>, <baby_britney1>, <IM_2_MUCH_4U>, <AnGeL_GlRL>, <Luvable_gurl15>, <buttercup20031> and <guest-hotgirlz>. These
usernames suggest that the chatters, if not actually young girls, are at least
identified with a popular teen culture of physicality and cuteness. In
real-life <Luvable_gurl15> could be a 58 year old male, but if so he is
entirely conversant with the codes and values of the Britney culture – even
down to the assertiveness of the orthography: the post-feminist/netchick “gurl”
replacing the conventional – and less powerful – “girl”.
Secondly, the title of the chatroom identifies the chatters as interested in the celebrity icon, Britney Spears. The chatroom title alone can provide information on the identity of a participant; for example, in a chatroom such as “Iraq4u”. An adolescent chatroom such as this one is likely to focus discussion on aspects of personal self, as users construct identity around the image and stylized behaviours represented in their idol. A comparison table with a computer software discussion chat shows this to be true in the Britney Spears room. And yet there are distinguishing features beyond the level of topic as well. Abbreviations were used more extensively; suggesting that adolescent play over identity is also enacted within talk-texting strategies.
|
|
Emoticons too serve a purpose beyond just the saving of time. They are also a marker of informality, and so an “antilanguage”, in Halliday’s sense, indicating a special subcultural group identity, and used to show who is familiar or “up-to-date” with the latest language being used. Of the seven case studies, I have found the highest incidence of abbreviations (30%) and emoticons (6%) in the Britney Spears chatroom (see http://www.geocities.com/picture_poems/thesis/tables.htm for a statistical comparison of the seven chatrooms). In fact the abbreviation for laughing-out-loud “lol” was used fifteen times. In this chatroom frequency counts of specific language forms are indeed revelatory. There were 294 words used within the collected data corpus, with the personal pronoun “I” used the most frequently, (18 times) and “lol” used the next most frequently (15 times). In one sequence “lol” is used nine times in 20 turns, which is more frequent than in any other chatroom examined in this study. Another form of laughing-out-loud “LMAO” (Laughing my ass off) was used five times.
Firstly then, chatroom semiotics show the specialist communicative skill-level of the participator and whether he or she is in the right communicative arena to continue to be an accepted part of the chat community. Yet identity work of this kind in the Britney Spears chatroom is limited to the user name and the textual input of the chatter. By contrast, in face-to-face conversation, forms of identification are much more extensive and include cues which can reveal personal identity, national identity, occupational identity, corporate identity, gender identity and even religious identity (see Berger, 1998). So the talk-texting and linguistic creativity of these young chatters must achieve high levels of sophistication in order to convey all of the information needed to assert a “Britney” self, and yet remain a distinctive and desirable co-locutor in the “flattened” yet still competitive space of the chatroom. One dimension of chat which seems to become suppressed in these conditions is that of extended reciprocal conversation – those longer threads of debate, information exchange or narrative, which appear in some other chat spaces and cultures. Here, while such narratives of experience for example do exist, they are constantly interrupted by the “social recognition” postings of greetings and farewells, and reactive-expressive turns, working less to cement sociality than to maintain affective role within the chat relation.
Having established such high degrees of symbolic or creative-linguistic play, it becomes important with this chat culture to examine more carefully how this specific talk-texting repertoire works. Pragmatics as a lens of conversational analysis in chatrooms (Ayer, 1968; Pierce, 1980) can reveal a socially embedded reading of chat “talk”. Pragmatics helps to focus on how the various communicative items in chatrooms; emoticons, abbreviations and misspelled words as well as chat utterance sentence structures (CUSS) are used within an on-line linguistic society. Pragmatics in chatrooms starts from the observation that people use on-line language to accomplish certain kinds of acts, broadly known as speech acts (Speech Act Theory is discussed in Case Study Four). Studies by Simeon J. Yates (1996) have shown that the language used in interactive speech in chatrooms more closely resembles spoken than written language, especially in the interpersonal respect (including use of personal pronouns). As I have shown, in Britney Spears chat, Table 8 - http://www.geocities.com/picture_poems/thesis/table8.htm (also on the CD) “I” has been used 18 times in the chat, the most used word in the whole chat.
Writing (or text-talking) back to a previous utterance in a synchronous conversational situation in chatrooms leads to a pragmatic re-contextualization of the use of the sorts of double-loaded semiotic expression discussed in Case Study Three. It is how the signs are read which provides meaning, and entices, or provokes, other participants to either continue building an utterance into a thread, or begin a new thread – including responses to its graphic or creative-abbreviation load. In Case Study Three there are several utterances that do not become threads, as they evoke no comment on them. For example neither of the following utterances have a response.
|
23. <baby_britney1> do any guys wanna chat? |
|
27.<SluGGie> need to fix my hair.. |
Despite the direct question/invitation in posting 23, and the focus on a Britney-culture preoccupation with physical appearance in posting 27, neither turn is answered. The sorts of creative play with chat-semiotic loadings which we have seen above appear more likely to evoke reciprocal posting, when otherwise powerful conversational and communicative strategies such as direct invitation or topic and contextual focus, do not. Even those postings which access and reproduce the contextual “antilanguage” or specialist codes, with the conventional attitudinal and behavioural signifiers in place, do not always succeed in chat. In these next two turns <Mickey_P_IsMine> similarly receives no response - but responds to him or her self in turn 64.
|
56. <Mickey_P_IsMine> Ahh i got a retest tomrrow mi failin math lol..and i think science |
|
64. <Mickey_P_IsMine> which i duno how im failin science |
The casual texting, including colloquialism (“dunno”), spelling lapses “tomrrow “, and “mi” for “im” = “I’M”) – even the “lol” abbreviation – code into the established styles of group talk – yet seemingly without sufficient creativity to gain notice. While responding to abbreviations and emoticons and colloquial forms and specialized lexical terms shows a commonality of understanding amongst those who are chatting, this appears not enough in itself to command a reply. Commonality is clearly indicated when <Paul665> in turn 44 asks <Jen> to give details on his or her self, and it is evident that to evoke a response <Paul665> must assume that Jen knows the abbreviation “asl”.
|
44. <Paul665> Ok Jenn asl |
<Pretty_Jennifer> responds:
|
51. <Pretty_Jennifer> 15/f/fl u? |
But while we can clearly see that here the codes are exchanged in perfect reciprocity, what we cannot do is calculate with certainty why this exchange succeeds, while others fail. The gambit is not as directive as in <baby_britney1>’s direct question in posting 23, so that we are left with an interesting possibility that the direct question works less effectively in this chat context than the coded-abbreviated “asl” convention: perhaps a signal of <Paul665>’s chat-credentials and comparative “cool” – while <baby-britney1> may be showing too much real-world social desperation and push. But it is impossible to be certain. Maybe chatters were attending to other surrounding threads as posting 23 arrived. It is at such points that textual analysis, no matter how multi-layered, begins to fail, and only ethnographic or observational work can succeed.
Since Case Study Three therefore raises the question of whether the conversation in each chatroom varies in its focus in relation to talk techniques, and not just in topic focus, this study moves to consider which talk forms are evident in chat, and whether variability in given chat spaces can be detected – and perhaps even predicted, from the “chat community” present. Case Study Four used Speech Act Theory to identify dominant types of speech activity in a single chat space. While IRC chat makes application of Speech Act Theory difficult, because of the indeterminacy of the “response”, it is still possible to categorise postings within the speech act repertoire, and, where threaded exchanges are evident, to evaluate the success or “felicity conditions” of an utterance. It remains difficult to assess how much of the intentional load of a chat utterance is carried by para-linguistic elements such as emoticons or abbreviations, codings shown as of immense communicative significance in previous case studies. Given the frequency of use and rapid assimilation of these elements into on-line communication in various media, it is important to attempt at least a preliminary investigation of their “speech act” role.
In chat there are clear examples of direct speech acts being deployed, and in quite conventional ways:
|
Speech Act |
Sentence |
Function |
Examples |
|
Assertion
|
Declarative.
|
conveys
information; is true or false |
(Case
Study Four) 11) <Nicole528> im a Gemini (Case
Study One) 10) <guest-MoreheadCityNC> NO she's near 10th & (Case
Study One) 77) <SWMPTHNG> THERE'LL BE PLENTY OF MEXICAN ROOFERS IN N
CAROLINA |
|
Question |
Interrogative |
elicits
information |
(Case
Study Four) 2) dingo42 nicole wahts your sign ?? (Case
Study Four) 17) <AquarianBlue> your meeting her judy? when? (Case
Study Four) 32) <Night-Goddess_> anyone cool in here? (Case
Study - 911) 182) Brazilian report: some one know any new about the manhattan situation
??? |
|
Orders
and Requests |
Imperative |
causes
others to behave in certain ways |
(Case
Study Five) 47) <scud4> bwitched stop scrollin in here (Case
Study One) 123) <Zardiw> smptthing................go back to your SWAMP |
Direct speech acts that use
performative verbs to accomplish their ends expand the three basic types shown:
statements, requests and commands (as shown below).
Statements
|
Case
Study One |
37.
<EMT Calvin> well folks im signing off here |
Questions
|
Case Study Six |
49. <Brian> r u talking
about blaxxun and shout3d implimentations or something else |
Orders and Requests
|
See
the CD “911.doc” |
296.
<MissMaca> Brazillian Report: Iknow it was a building %&#%head.
Give up on the %&#%ing nuke's ok!!!>. |
Indirect forms in chat are dominated by a generalized activation formation, which masquerades as a question addressed to the entire chat community:
|
Case Study
One |
74. <guestTom> does anyone know where floyd isnow>.
|
|
Case Study One |
125. <guest kodiak> does anyone
know why UNCC has not closed>. |
|
Case Study One |
162. <guestEZGuest367> Anyone know if I should worry about daughter in west NC?>. |
The form has even evolved
its own abbreviation:
|
Appendix “911” 370. |
< |
The first four postings are clearly in
the form of questions, but equally clearly are not inquiries about issues the
chatter can anticipate will be answered by an expert “knower”. Thus the speech
act is in itself indirect, as we can see by examining possible answers. Most of
the time, the answer “yes, I do” to any of these four questions would be an
uncooperative response. The normal answers we would expect in real life talk
would be “Yes, the Weather Channel tells us that Hurricane Floyd is passing
over North Carolina now”; <UNCC is closed because of the storm>; <if
your daughter is in the eye of the storm you should be worried>; <another
active New York chatroom is at http://www.superglobe.com/chat/>. Because
of the anonymity of the chat situation, each response depends upon what could
be called a “validation” format: the use of an indirect statement or reported
speech from another context: “The weather channel tells us that…” A simple
“yes” answer that responded to the literal meaning would usually be taken for
an uncooperative answer in actual social life. For example “Yes, I do”, would
be heard as “Yes, I do, but I'm not necessarily going to tell you where the
storm is, why UNCC is closed or the location of other active chatrooms in NY”.
So the five examples above function as indirect questions, more accurately
coded as “I want you to tell me where the storm is now”, “I would like to know
whether UCC is closed yet”, or “Please tell me of some other New York chatrooms
so that I can move to them” and the chatroom participants are clearly able to
interpret this function, and respond appropriately. In other words, despite the
added indirection of chat speech act formation, chat continues. But this means
that very complex speech act relations are concealed beneath the quick-form
exchanges of IRC – across a range of chat communities. Indirect speech acts
appear to be in heavy use.
The key question for this Case Study and
this chatroom
“What is a successful speech act in a
chatroom?” thus appears to require consideration of the more than usual
loadings of indirect speech acts inside a non-physical and multilogue talk
community.
Austin and Searle claim that the speech
act is the basic unit of meaning and force, or the most basic linguistic
entity, with both a constative and a performative dimension. They both accept
that there are illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts, using Speech Act
Theory as their theoretical foundation and analysing the data by message
length, distribution, message links, and interaction. Speech Act Theory is
based on the notion that what people say is consistent with what they do
(Howell-Richardson; Mellar, 1996). Such a definition indicates that we should
examine those zones in which chat “unravels” some of the regulatory functions
hypothesized in speech act theory. Distribution roles, or those aspects of
speech working to direct talk relations and to control its performative
dimensions, are problematic within the generalized speech relations of chat:
one explanation of the sorts of indirect strategies outlined above – and maybe
of the retreat into saturating expressives and relational work.
In part this indeterminacy which bedevils
speech act analysis in chat rests in the technologisation and “de-threading” of
the format. Speech Act Theory cannot categorise all utterances in a chatroom,
with certainty – and it may be that the confusion and chaos that new users so
frequently report of the chat experience relates to this indeterminacy, in
relation to off-line talk. Yet at the same time regular chat users do manage
their talk successfully.
Speech Act Theory can be used to examine
features common to all chatrooms. In
particular it can help establish interconnections within the threads of
conversation. Unlike face-to-face conversation, where a person appears to
respond to the most recent statement in a conversation, in a chatroom the
utterance can be a continuation of someone else’s utterance - or it can be on a
new topic, with the hope that someone else may join in. The example below shows
three unrelated utterances, but all are either continuations of a thread or the
initiation of a new thread:
|
30) <judythejedi> i don't think so..she's bringing amtrack down maybe |
|
31) <Nicole528> whats your sign dingo? |
|
32) <Night-Goddess_> anyone cool in here? |
Because of the technologisation of chat there are no markers to segregate or “direct” this conversational traffic. Chat participants must then de-code the speech acts, and re-connect threads into logically sequential strands. Since posting 30 relates to an earlier posting, only those participants already threaded into that particular chat will respond – unless of course a new chatter asks directly “You don’t think what? She who? Amtrak down to where? Why only ‘maybe’”? Since such a response would be an interruption of an implied co-locutor relation, it is unlikely to occur. Posting 31 creates a similar “directedness”, signing it with the user name “dingo” – the sole participant invited to reply. So it is no surprise that of these three consecutive postings, it is 32, the generalized and indirect question/invitation form, which succeeds. Following <Night-Goddess_>’s utterance <anyone cool in here?> a thread develops that plays across the issue of whether anyone is “cool” in this room – and incidentally provides a possible answer to the role of posting 34 from <AquarianBlue>.
|
32) <Night-Goddess_> anyone cool in here? |
|
33)<judythejedi> hi night |
|
34)/\32 <AquarianBlue> hmmmmmmm |
|
35)/\32 <judythejedi>everyone is cool here |
|
36)/\32 <Nicole528> is cool lol |
|
37)<poopaloo> 10ty judy |
|
38)/\32 <Nicole528> is cold too |
|
39)<sara4u> I LOVE YOU TO MUCH.......ACARD |
|
40)<jijirika>is back |
|
41) <tazdevil144> cool |
For this speech act to be completed there needs to be an understanding of what <Night-Goddess_> means by “being cool”. The speech community within the room chooses in interesting ways to respond by playing across the semantics of the term “cool” – yet in doing so, indicates an understanding of the indirectness of her speech act strategy. As <Nicole528> and <poopaloo> evaluate and reward the claim from <judythejedi> that all the chatters in this space are cool, and <tazdevil> extends the game by using the term to express pleasure that <jijirika> has rejoined the chat, each understands not only the “surface” codes, or display techniques which sign “cool” chat expertise: “lol”, and “10 ty”, but also the indirection of <Night-Goddess>’s speech act. This is not a directed question. As its “anyone” address formula shows, it is an invitation to talk. But specifically, in its address to not only a chat community, but to a known and familiar group (note <judythejedi>’s diminutive tag-name response: “night”) it creates a speech act which is less a general question than an assertion of communality. In effect, it says something like: “Hello to all my old friends: I’m ready to be as active in chat as usual” – and those chat friends react entirely appropriately. Responses demonstrate “cool”, in chat terms, with a mix of community affirmation:
|
<judythejedi> everyone is cool here> |
appreciation of the communality:
|
<Nicole528> is cool lol> |
and the sort of metatextual play across chat conventions which establishes the cachet of cool on-line:
|
<Nicole528> is cold too> |
No surprise then that the thread is continued for several more turns before a new thread is begun. The original utterance serves not to elicit specific answers, but to evoke the sorts of talk which on-line chat promotes, and which is distinctive to its form: reflexive, linguistically aware, communally directed, generalized and inclusive/exclusive, fast-paced, and multi-threaded:
|
49)
\32 10c. <Night-Goddess_> I is not cool |
|
50)
\49 5l. <judythejedi> yup |
|
51)
\49 6j. <Nicole528> really |
|
52)
\4910d. <Night-Goddess_> I is awsome |
|
53)
\496k. <Nicole528> yes your cool |
|
54)
\465m. <judythejedi> lol..i know prncess |
|
55)
\476l. <Nicole528> cool dingo |
|
56)
\521c. <gina2b> coolfool |
Is there then sufficient evidence to
assert that in its Speech Acts, on-line chat is predominantly relational –
working more on its communal elements through generalization of its modalities,
than on its performative or illocutionary acts? To test this requires
assessment of chat in a strongly topic-directed chatroom – one in which we
might anticipate task and topic oriented talk. Case Study 5 takes up the
analysis of chat in an Astrology chatroom, in which many chatters appear to
already know one another – therefore appearing less reliant on self-assertion
or community formation.
If there is a preponderance of relational talk-texting in chat rooms, by examining a chatroom with a predominance of markedly short turn-taking sequences and a clear and consistently central foucs on topic, it may be possible to discover whether even in the rapidly scrolling conversation of on-line chat, there is enough time and appropriate “speech act” work establishing a communication community amongst the chatters present.
Talk in text-based chat is as fleeting as its off-line equivalent. Text disappears as it scrolls by. The participant gets one opportunity to read the text, after which time it cannot be retrieved – at least not without time out for back-scrolling – during which period postings continue to amass. This capacity I have called “fleeting text”. On-line fleeting text affects discursive connectiveness. There is a counter-intuitive distinction here between talk and text. Conventional spoken language is also dynamic, fleeting, and irreversible communication, but printed language breaks the strictures of time and leads to permanence. The two together in an on-line environment contain elements of both – what has been said can be “revisited”, as long as the chatroom is showing previous turn takings. My data cannot show evidence that users do check back to re-establish threads, but the co-presence of postings onscreen, even while fleeting and constantly mobile, does encourage longer consideration than in talk.
Thread-framing is in itself a major phenomenon in chatrooms. A posting appears to “begin” and “end” because it arrives on the receivers’ screens inside an individual text-box. These framed pieces of conversation are of course not necessarily sequential. Threads twist around, stop and start, and several may arrive at one time, in a seemingly chaotic fashion. What then is the relationship between the seeming coherence of a single chat utterance, and its equally contained surrounding utterances?
We have already seen that the apparent commensurability of utterances, each framed in the same spatial convention, is an illusion. Immediately consecutive utterances are often unrelated, or at least out of sequence – and many remain so. Further, because this form of visual framing is the only contribution to the communicative regulation of texted-talk by its technologisation, users themselves must work instead at the level of language alone – including of course both verbal and visual elements – to construct meaningful communication.
At the linguistic level the
“threading” which constructs meaningful conversational exchanges across and
between these individual and flattening visual frames also must read back
possibilities for response. It is this form of “framing” which gives a starting
and finishing point to a thread, and turns it from an artificial sequence of
random utterances to a meaningful conversation. Since there are no visual
codings contributed by the
|
32) <Night-Goddess_> anyone cool in here? |
|
49) <Night-Goddess_> I is not cool |
|
52) <Night-Goddess_> I is awsome |
Because this topic had centred so clearly upon the word “cool”, this transformation – “cool” becomes “awesome” – ends the potential for wordplay, and so terminates the frame. But to sense this termination chat participants must be able to “read” and respond beyond the level of conversational turn-taking exchange – the CA level. By reading speech act intent in utterances, and seeing <Night-Goddess> “switch off” the topic cue at this point, collocutors can indeed note a frame termination – and they move on accordingly.
The initial framing of a thread can thus determine – or at least work towards determining – its success and duration. But in the case above, as already noted there is a particularly consensual group in communication. This community of astrology followers appears to be regular collocutors on-line, and know one another’s behaviours. How far then is this, the cooperative communication of a friendship group, as opposed to a specific communicative behaviour of on-line communities generally; a feature of “chat”, rather than of this one example of “astrochat”?
One way to examine this is to check for deliberate interventions: “policing” of chat posts. If there is hostility shown in a chatroom, or as shown in Case Study One, an attitude such as racism, (in this case towards Mexican roofers) will other speakers contribute to the thread in like manner, supportively, as in the astrochat sequence? Here there is clear evidence that such threads can be very deliberately de-railed, and comments such as <SWMPTHNG>’s stopped by others. A different speaker can and will end a thread, indicating a multi-chatter frame (see Tannen, 1998; Bays, 2000). Since to do so they must however also “read” the frame – understand the intent of the utterance – the termination/transformation intervention still acts as evidence for the power of talk-text framing. So clear is the framing intent (or re-framing intent) of some postings to some collocutors, that they move to end a posting – or at least, to re-direct it. And indeed, without such framing a thread could continue indefinitely. Framing is what completes the thought in chatroom discourse but it is also what enables groups to maintain focus. How then does each participant enact these interventions and responses within a given frame? What additional problems for analysis of chat exchange does its online practice present?
Using conversation analysis (CA) in chatrooms helped me discover how communication on-line regulates its exchanges. While the “capturing” of data is different in chatrooms from that used to research face-to-face conversation there are similarities in the analysis process. Traditionally, CA researchers audio record a session and discuss from a printed readout “what happened” in the conversational exchanges. In the example below from such a taped session[3] the time between turns and the pauses in the conversation are noted – not an element that can be considered in on-line chat, or at least not in those chatrooms which do not mark the time of arrival of each utterance – and even then, given the packet-switching technology, this does not reflect the times of entry for a given posting. Some aspects conventionally of communicative import in CA are therefore not available for analysis in chat. In CA for instance most work is done with two or three people speaking. In the example below two people are having a phone conversation. This one-on-one speech relation, or its close approximation within a small group, has contributed many of the techniques and features of CA method.
To an extent, the features
identified by CA in small-group or dyadic talk relations can also describe
chatroom interactions. Conversational analysis of chatroom talk shows for
instance examples of adjacency pairs and turn-taking conventions common in
CA-analyses of natural talk. But both the capacity for multilogue and the
technologisation of the talk, through text and through
|
A CA transcription from tape recording |
B Web 3D Chat on CD at 6a.doc |
Utterances are mostly complete turns in chatrooms, with the only breakage in a particular utterance being made by the user at the time of the utterance – for only if they press the enter button does the utterance become broken. In the chatroom turns 21-24 below (column B) <Leonard> makes two utterances that are different thoughts, but because they are entered sequentially without anyone making an utterance between the two thoughts <web3dADM> is left to answer them both, as different thoughts, sequentially after <Leonard>’s entrances.
|
21) <Leonard> Anyone used Xeena? |
|
22) <Leonard> 3D just arrived today |
|
23) <web3dADM> no it's on my list |
|
24) <web3dADM> ahhh great Len |
In a face-to-face conversation one would assume that <web3dADM> would respond to <Leonard>’s question, <Anyone used Xeena?> with the utterance <no it's on my list> and then to <Leonard>’s <3D just arrived today> with <ahhh great Len>, ordering the conversation differently:
|
21) <Leonard> Anyone used Xeena? |
|
23) <web3dADM> no it's on my list |
|
22) <Leonard> 3D just arrived today |
|
24) <web3dADM> ahhh great Len |
If in fact utterances 21 and 22 had been offered in sequence in a natural conversation, it is also likely that <web3dADM> would reverse the response sequence, offering his expressive and evaluative response before his explanation – in effect replying to 22 before 21:
|
21) <Leonard> Anyone used Xeena? |
|
22) <Leonard> 3D just arrived today |
|
24) <web3dADM> ahhh great Len |
|
23) <web3dADM> [no] it's on my list [too] |
Online however, <web3dADM> could have been typing in <no it's on my list> at the same time as <Leonard> was typing in <3D just arrived today> - or even before, since we do not know the relative distances travelled through the system, or the traffic-flow conditions encountered by the packet-switching .[4]
According to conversation analysis, turn-taking is integral to the formation of any interpersonal exchange. Online however, the conventions of turns are very much modified. Chat participants appear conversant and comfortable with the new regulatory demands. Unless lurking, the participants in chatrooms demonstrate their knowledge of the particular chat conventions of the chat-site they are visiting in order to be accepted or rejected by others in the chatroom.
The signalling of one’s
status as an insider is for instance especially important in establishing
dominance. In the chatroom I used for this case study with its expert topic of
computer animation, it is clear that <web3dADM> is the leader or
moderator, not only because of the abbreviation for administrator (
The underpinnings of CA,
sequential organization, turn-taking and repair, and how they can depict
interactional competence, are therefore useful in reading chatroom talk.
However, the circumstances of chatroom technologisation demand adaptations to
CA protocols, to enable analysis of conversational relations occurring in
de-threaded sequences. Unlike face-to-face conversation the sequential
organization of a given chat exchange needs to be separated from what else is
being enacted in the chatroom. The isolating of pairs in the chat is difficult
if there are many people chatting and the text is scrolling at a rapid
rate. In finding adjacent pairs in Case
Study One for instance the conversation had to be re-threaded. What is revealed below is that there is a
turn-taking strategy present between <lookout4110> and <Werblessed>, but each utterance has several turns in between.
|
Turn |
Between
Utterances |
Speaker |
utterance |
|
60. |
|
<lookout4110> |
Who
is in Wilm. right now? |
|
64. |
4 |
<Werblessed> |
Im
50 Miles west of Wilm. |
|
73. |
9/13 |
<lookout4110> |
How
ya holding up Werblessed? |
|
83. |
10/19 |
<Werblessed> |
So
far just strong wind gusts and lots of rain.. Over 8 inches so far.. |
|
89. |
6/16 |
<lookout4110> |
Have
the winds been strong? |
|
98. |
9/15 |
<Werblessed> |
Gusts
up to 60-65 so far its starting to pick up a bit.. Only gonna get stronger
Between now and midnite |
The first number in the
“between utterances” column is the number of turns since the previous utterance
was addressed, and the second number is the number of turns since the last
utterance by the same speaker. The complexity of the posting relation is
apparent. After these three sets of turn-takings <lookout4110> and <Werblessed> no longer interact directly. <lookout4110> contributes more utterances,
concluding at turn 164, and <Werblessed>’s final utterance in this segment is at turn 180. In
other words, given the multiple threads available for response in on-line chat,
threads form and reform, as participants shift focus. But the degree to which
such shifts are driven by the complexities of the multilogue is hard to
evaluate – another feature which CA is unable to address, and which may require
a more ethnographic inquiry to assess.
CA is however able to help the online chat analyst consider some aspects of conversational breakdown – for instance, repair, a standard part of normal conversation. Natural conversation is rich in examples of breakdown – a feature which CA analysts often find disruptive to other programs of their analysis:
When we consider spontaneous
speech (particularly conversation) any clear and obvious division into
intonational-groups is not so apparent because of the broken nature of much
spontaneous speech, including as it does hesitation, repetitions, false starts,
incomplete sentences, and sentences involving a grammatical caesura in their
middle (Cruttenden, 1986, pg. 36).
In chatrooms, where
utterances are mostly posted complete, this experience of breakdown at first
sight seems less of a problem. But chat-repairs do come about, due to two
primary causes. The first is introduced when a word is typed incorrectly – for
instance, when <IroquoisPrncess> says <hey Judy did a get my car in the
link thingy>. While “car” is a proper word, it is wrongly entered when
“card” is intended and confuses the meaning, since interlocutor <judythejedi>
does not associate the word “car” with the utterance-topic, leaving
<IroquoisPrncess> to correct the error. Here the error is text and
|
From Case Study Four |
From Case Study Six |
|
57) <IroquoisPrncess> hey Judy did a get my car inthe link thingy 63) <judythejedi> car in the link? 66) <IroquoisPrncess> card |
40)
<Leonard> I will
be offereing it on-line through 41)
<brian> can't
make it 42)
<Leonard> spring |
Are there then instances of chat which
require more than the sorts of extended CA repertoires discussed here, for
examination of the full range of utterance behaviours and conversational
techniques? Are the chat participants examined above displaying both
interesting instances of the language-use pressures of chat, and conscious
attempts to redress these? Are there other techniques of talk or text analysis
which can help both identify and explain some of these communicative
behaviours? One issue raised in CA work on chat is the need for a more
finely-focused examination of word-selection and word-ordering in utterances –
and especially in such self-conscious moments as those occurring around
instances of repair. In a final pass over the chat-room communicative experience,
this study used current approaches to grammatical analysis, to assess how far
chat already displays ways to use and/or depart from standard text or talk
grammar conventions.
This case study examined baseball chat, a talk-community likely to use high degrees of informality in grammatical formations, to assess whether the functioning of grammar in chatroom communication could be shown to be the same as, or different to, that evident in text or talk. Do common grammatical conventions – such as word order, sentence structure, question formation, hold up in on-line chat? Do baseball-chatters on-line use the same specialist formations as their off-line brethren? Are there any new constructions evident?
Language in a chatroom certainly proved to be altered by its users, both deliberately and by mistake. Formal sentence structure conventions become less evident, as abbreviation and graphic elements arise to meet the speed-entry demands of the chat technology and its new communicative ethos. Compound forms arise, with the informality of spoken language, but enacted in the sorts of textual play and creativity otherwise seen in communicative genres such as poetry, or advertising. The grammar of chatrooms, if it is done intentionally, is developing a highly sophisticated form of prose that is semantically and semiotically innovative and daring.
Below, <CathyTrix-guest> in turn 108 creates the utterance <2blech>. Such combinations of numerals and letters have no place or “utterability” in spoken conversation – yet in this chatroom, at this moment, inside this thread, the utterance communicates. The “2” refers to an earlier request for chatters to press the “3” key if they like the New York Yankees baseball team. <CathyTrix-guest> emphases his or her dislike of the Yankees by pressing a different key from the “3” suggested, confirming it with the comment: “blech” - not conventionally a meaningful word, but one used colloquially as an onomatopoeic representation of the act of vomiting. The turn thus communicates something like “I don’t like the Yankees, they make me sick, I would only score them at a rate of 2”. The economy, the creativity and the expressiveness of the utterance overturn the conventions of a more formal sentence construction, without losing communicative power. But at the same time, they demonstrate a linguistic and grammatical formatting not available or possible in speaking about baseball.
|
98. |
<NMMprod> |
2n. |
if you like the yanks press 3 |
|
99. |
<dhch96> |
5p. |
1111111111 |
|
100. |
<BLUERHINO11> |
1l. |
got it |
|
101. |
<dhch96> |
5q. |
1111111 |
|
102. |
<smith-eric> |
8j. |
5555555 |
|
103. |
<dhch96> |
5r. |
11111111 |
|
104. |
<dhch96> |
5s. |
111111 |
|
105. |
<CathyTrix-guest> |
6g. |
2I hate the Yankees |
|
106. |
<smith-eric> |
8k. |
don't have a 3 |
|
107. |
<Pizza2man> |
7o. |
12456789 |
|
108. |
<CathyTrix-guest> |
6h. |
2blech |
|
109. |
<NMMprod> |
2o. |
hahahahahaha |
|
110. |
<dhch96> |
5t. |
yankees s-ck |
|
111. |
<BLUERHINO11> |
1m. |
im removing that # now |
|
112. |
<NMMprod> |
2p. |
you wish |
Similar concision in chat
utterances operates as both efficiency forced by the required typing speeds,
and a stylistic marker of on-line competency. In turn 77 of this chat
<MLB-LADY> enters a question: “dd any see the atanta score”. A formally
grammatical rendering would produce the form: “did anyone see the
Similar effects are achieved by the use of single letters or numerals in place of whole words: u – you, 4 – for, r –are, c – see, 2 – to. In posting 128 of Case Study Seven <BLUERHINO11> refers to <dhch96>by using the letter “d” – an abbreviation of a user-tag which works as both familiarity (“may I call you “d”, <dhch96>?) and as on-line efficiency.
In chatrooms, grammar is thus a developing protocol, reacting to both the demands of the rapid scrolling of the conversational threads, and to the creative demands of establishing on-line communicative competence. Common grammatical and orthographic principles are applied differently in chatrooms. In society generally, we use grammar to judge people in terms of social status, regional origins, and educational level. In chatrooms the rules have to some extent already changed. A person may be judged by how efficiently he or she types, and by the familiarity they are able to display with on-line chat conventions, such as abbreviations, graphics integration, and the capacity to respond to creative utterances in kind – to continue the stylistic directions of a thread, as well as its content or semantic load – and that may well mean “reading” and writing back the sorts of grammatical adjustments outlined in Case Study Seven. There does indeed appear to be evidence that on-line chat is activating new elements in the communicative repertoire.
Overall, the case study sites have then been able to display not only communicative complexity inside the chat utterances, but complexity resolving into specific on-line chat techniques. Electronic chat is no longer only one small communication exercise among many, sharing most of the communicative styles of natural conversation or equivalent text forms (such as for instance the memo), but an important and distinctive form of communication, establishing its own regulatory systems and practices. Internet text-based chat is already changing as a technology, with the increasing use of webcams, multimedia and 3D Graphics-based chat communities[5] and the ability to use voice instead of only text. New applications of text-based chat are appearing with the availability of wearable computers[6], including miniature PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular phone watches, cognitive-radios[7], and electronic performance support systems (EPSS)[8]. Such devices will enable people to access information via networks anytime, even while out walking. But as this occurs, it will in turn force adaptations to the sorts of on-line communicative practices revealed in this study, and others. From the discussion of the seven primary chatrooms in the case studies and several secondary chatrooms I have found that there are common, “core” elements, present on all web-based chat sites, as well as specialist elements on specialist sites – and further, that these elements are not limited to a special lexis, as might be expected in such relatively new communication contexts, but extend to the full range of communicative behaviours.
This study has shown too that chatrooms place particular limitations on communication, producing unique communicative strategies which not only mark them as communicative locations and cultures, but are consciously deployed by users to demonstrate competence and status within on-line community. In summary, moving from Case Study to Case Study, the following communicative features already mark on-line chat:
Author as reader, reader as author (Case
Study 1)
On-line, as talk text generates, the
“reader” and the “author” can be the same person at the same time. The listening and response phases of
face-to-face conversation are less separable on-line, where the formulation of
a reply is dependent upon a high-demand interpretation or “reading” of prior
postings – including their formatting, recognition of which is required for
reciprocal expression, which lifts a participant’s status within the chatroom.
Without this capacity to process postings at speed, and to reply creatively and
in like mode, chat participants become less successful in on-line
communication. To be a powerful on-line “author” is also to be a competent
on-line “reader”.
Chatroom titles as
communicative-community controls (Case Study 1)
The title of a given chatroom often fails
to indicate what is actually discussed. On-line communities, like casual
conversationalists in the off-line world, very often redirect their
communicative focus – and sometimes permanently, with consensual groups setting
up regular meetings in spaces no longer very relevant to their topics. This “drift” in topic direction demonstrates
once again the focus produced within on-line chat on communicative technique,
with chat very often more directed towards features of its own communicative
repertoires than to pre-determined topics.
Multiple-Authorship in different
chatrooms (Case Study 2)
It is difficult in face-to-face
conversation to carry on two or more conversations at the same time, but in
chat communication it is possible to open two or more screens on one’s monitor,
in order to chat in several chatrooms at the same time. This can be expanded to
having conversations in different locations at the same time, for example
speaking with someone in
Avatars (Case Study 3)
Avatars are graphic or textual
representatives of the speaker, based on how the chatter identifies him or
herself. The avatar could be an animal, cartoon, celebrity or any object. An
avatar is the chatter at the time of textual engagement. Again, its created
character both distantiates and characterizes a chat participant, acting to
position them in the larger chat community in a preferred way. The persona thus
also becomes a part of the communicative intent, adding to the complexity of
chat techniques.
Emoticons (Case Study 3)
Using a series of keyed
characters to indicate an emotion, such as pleasure [:-) J] or sadness [:-( L] chatters are able to communicate beyond the “word”, giving faster
communication. Some emoticons are becoming universal – even carrying the same
meaning in different languages. The
first and most used emoticon is the smiley[9]. Emoticons re-deploy the keyboard repertoire, adding
expression to a communicative form denied the expressive techniques of gesture,
facial expression or vocalization. Once again however they have already
established themselves as a layer of communicative competence, used not only to
add nuance (acting for instance as mitigators or intensifiers) but to
demonstrate creativity and “wit” in interchanges.
Threads and Discontinuity (Case Study 4)
Because conversational threads disconnect
in on-line chat, as the posting sequences react to the technologisation of the
IRC software and not to interpersonal turn-relations, all chat participants
must both accept and learn to negotiate discontinuities in their postings and
those of others. The ability to focus on topic and to build even multilogue
discussion under these circumstances has already established itself across many
types of chatroom – so much so that common elements of practice are already
evident from chatroom to chatroom. Often even very extended sequences of
intervening text do not appear to deter thread focus, while chatters are also
able to respond to sequences which “de-thread” as postings arrive in
inappropriate order; i.e. sequences dictated more by typing speeds or transport
efficiency than by the logic of the topic development. This particular form of
“repair” work appears to pose few problems for chatters.
Discontinuity, i.e. popup ads or ads
amongst the turn-takings (Case Study 4)
One form of stop in the flow of
conversation in chatrooms is caused by advertisements that are auto-inserted at
regular places amongst turn-takings. Different chatrooms will have varying
spaces for their ads, some having an ad appear every five turns, others
displaying ads that appear to randomly pop-up in the midst of the chat. These
interruptions also appear to be no problem to chat participants, who remain
focused on their threads. It appears that intervening postings of this kind are
dealt with not as chat, but as otherwise-framed text, which does not
“interrupt” the texts of talk.
Chatroom graffiti (Case Study 5)
The messages conveyed
through the work of graffiti artists are often highly political and
deliberately aggressive, positioned in public spaces most likely to attract
notice and force response. Some on-line participants go from chatroom to
chatroom, leaving messages but not participating in chatroom conversation: I
refer to this as chatroom graffiti. Perhaps because their postings appear to
chatters as utterance rather than as “otherwise-framed” text, these postings
are more likely to evoke negative response – especially if repeated.
Fleeting text (Case Study 5)
Chat, despite its textual base, is still
a synchronous communication form, yet lacks the
permanency of asynchronous texted message systems. Thus, despite its texted
format, it shares more features with talk than with prose – among them the
tendency to “patrol” or work positively and negatively to maintain the specific
features of the communicative forms and relations present in a given chatroom.
This drive to include and exclude utterance forms, utterances and utterers is
evident in different degrees and different ways in different spaces and chat
modes, but does mark a communal sense of control over chat, and a regulation of
what is and is not acceptable or preferred behaviour.
Lurking (Case Study 6)
Lurking is one behaviour which may not be
welcomed in chatrooms. Some chatrooms do not show inactive chatters in the room
and therefore the lurker is even more hidden from view. A lurker is able to
read and observe behaviour in a chatroom without making any contribution – but
since chat is by definition a participatory activity, lurking defies all
aspects of the communicative act, with even the “reading” which we might
anticipate as being carried out by a lurker being inactive by virtue of its
failure to connect with the “w/reading” of texted chat which is signaled in
properly configured response postings. Since chat status is judged by the
relevance and creativity and format-matching of one’s postings, lurking is so
low status as to attract derision and censure – or at the very least,
nervousness.
Collaborated-Selves (Case Study 6)
MUDs and MOOs are
collaborative, networked environments where the MOO and MUD consists of a
number of connected rooms. Chatters create a “combined self”, partly
fictionalized but partly built on his or her own chat capacities and skills, in
order to create a space or story or thread in the chatroom. It is the MUD and
MOO experience which signals most clearly the continuity-separation aspect of
chat identity on-line, where the skills required to chat with authority and
efficacy – elements continuous with our off-line expectations of a “present” or
authorizing self from which “expression” can flow – can be shown to be
fictionally deployed, in the service of an on-line character role. This insight
drives a further wedge between identity and chat-skills: that is, it
establishes the distance that exists on-line between whatever roles and
statuses a chat participant may be accorded in real life, and those established
through their skills at on-line chat. It is here that the special chat codings
enter the scene, providing a repertoire of possibility across which chat
experts can play, to establish their on-line credibility.
Spelling, Abbreviations and Grammatical
errors as on-line “norms” (Case Study 7).
Abbreviations and grammatical errors are
not only accepted but also dominant in on-line chat, for two primary reasons.
Firstly the speed of “speech” in a chatroom does not provide time for writing
out what can be abbreviated, leading to forms such as “btw” for “by the way”.
Once this is established as commonplace however, it becomes a marker of
expertise. High-statused chatters – those whose postings gain attention –
display creative innovation and application of such compounds, abbreviations
and grammatico-orthographical reformations.
Moments of reciprocation between chatters all displaying command of
these new conventions become peak moments of on-line chat, showing the degree
to which chat conventions themselves are a major element of on-line community
identity, and have become central to chat as a communicative form.
Long gaps between asking and answering in
turn-takings, with other turn-takings in between – equivalent to the listening
phase in a conversation (Case Study Two)
If chat-community is established in the
formal conventions of chat “style”, “w/readers” or entrants to a chat space who
seek to participate must work to establish the repertoires in play; the level
of skills required to intervene, and the likely acceptability of their own
postings, in terms not just of ideas and opinions – semantic issues – but of
their capacity to reciprocate in kind at the formal level. But other elements
of chat skill are also demanded. The length of gap between turns, and the
ability to locate and follow discontinuous threads, also place a premium on
chatroom experience. For many new chat users this threading complexity is
baffling. Its difficulty is often dependent on, firstly, how many people there
are in the chatroom, and secondly the number of turn-takings offered and taken
up – by one or by many participants. For example, in the “911” chat I have
referred to in this study, there were as many as 45 turns in a minute –
sometimes two entries for the same second – which leaves little time to
construct those turns. Below there are seventeen turns in one minute.
|
|
|
Pete: Let kill all Palestian terrorist´s
greetings from |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
|
|
|
oscar: that's not shute will!!!! |
|
|
|
MissMaca: hikacked planes, and flew 3 planes into the pentagon. |
|
|
|
mike: I think so, miss maca. |
|
|
|
sascha:
hallo from |
|
|
|
Hello: How many building are still up in NY |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: Whats up in NY??????????? |
|
|
|
damaged: no then we get a world wore 2 |
|
|
|
dolly: our news says five planes now |
|
|
|
1Bone!!:
I'm from |
|
|
|
novyk: who's the author of this ... ??? Anyone know there ??? |
|
|
|
sascha: 3 |
|
|
|
Will: Pete: Siinähän se |
|
|
|
sascha: the 3rd world wore |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: %&#% 3. Worldwar?!?! |
|
|
|
oscar: hello 1 bone, where are you from? |
Of these eleven chatters who “spoke”, only three had more than one turn in that minute. <1Bone!!:> had four utterances in this minute:
|
|
|
1Bone!!: HELLLOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: Whats up in NY??????????? |
|
|
|
1Bone!!:
I'm from |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: %&#% 3. Worldwar?!?! |
The degree to which this chatter also
manages to engage other postings, all within this very tight time frame,
suggests on-line experience – as does the heavy use of keyboard expressives and
“stuttered” repetitions as intensifiers. <1Bone!!> is able to drive
multiple conversations right across the crowded chatroom, to follow up on
postings, but also to present a coherent and even passionate political
engagement – even permitting a
distraction: “I’m from Germany too!” as he/she notes Sascha’s posting. This
occupancy of close to 25% of this set of postings renders this chatter a
dominant force at this moment.
Chat technologisation and turn-taking
disruption: anticipating discourse
As in face-to-face chat there are
sometimes instances when an unexpected utterance occurs. With the de-ordering
that can occur within the delayed response of entry and posting, curious
effects can arise. In the thread above, <!Bone!!> has an utterance arrive
on the site only one second after <sascha>, at line 44 introduces the
phrase and so the concept: “world war”. Without the time=entry evidence,
<1Bone!!>’s posting looks like a response-turn: reaction either to the
suggestion of war, or perhaps to the misspelling: “world wore”. But the single
second of elapsed time makes this impossible. <1Bone!!>’s other turns
arrive at about 10-15 second intervals – about the time it takes to read,
respond, enter and have a posting arrive. What we have is not a response turn –
a dialogue – but two independent chatters arriving at the same conclusion at
the same moment.
|
|
|
sascha: the 3rd world wore |
|
|
|
1Bone!!: %&#% 3. Worldwar?!?! |
Repeated
utterances with little or no content e.g. “hello”, “anyone want to chat” (see
Case Study One).
In chat terms these are phatic
communicative entries: ritual exchanges, signaling presence in an otherwise
un-indicatable context. Greetings have become very quickly established as a
formal necessity in chatrooms, and a round of greetings is considered a
requirement for entry into existing chat threads, or the launching of new ones
– anything less is interruption. Unacknowledged greetings thus become signs that
a chat group is unwilling to admit more members: a hint to either await a
suitable thread to enter, or to go away. Repeated greetings from the same
individual thus read as intrusive – or perhaps as desperate. Unless such a
potential chat participant can move to establish the requisite codes of
credibility through the “display” features of their postings, they are less and
less likely to receive response and be admitted to chat exchange.
Short conversational utterances
In almost all cases, talk in
chatrooms is limited to short phrases. Rarely will there be more than several
words written at a time by a “speaker”. Counting the words of hundreds of entries
in my seven chatrooms (see table below) I found an average of 5.82 units per
turn; including words, abbreviations, and emoticons. Within that sampling 25
percent of words consisted of only two letters, and 20 percent consisted of
three letter words. Using
|
1) Purpose
chatroom (Hurricane Floyd) Avg. 7.17/per turn 2) Instant
Messenger (two-person conversation) 11.32/per
turn 3) Celebrity
chat Avg. 4.2per turn 4) Astrology
– purpose chat Avg. 3.5//per turn 5) No
topic chat - Avg. 3.2/per turn 6) Topic
(3D animation) chat Avg. 4.4/per
turn 7) Topic
– baseball chat - Avg. 6.7 /per
turn |
The above table shows that users
of multi-voiced chatrooms, whether they are working with a stated topic or not,
produce fewer utterances than users in a chatroom with only two people
speaking, as in an Instant Messenger environment. The Instant Messenger chat
that I “captured” had 11.32 words per turn compared to other chatrooms that
averaged 3.2; 3.5; 4.2; 4.4; 6.7 and 7.17 words per turn.
This implies that more is said when only two people are in a chatroom. With several voices seemingly all speaking, it is difficult, unless one is a very fast typist, to respond before someone else does. The “reading” time on a busy board, allied to the waiting time to have your own turns attended to with a directed response, cuts back on the ratio of postings from each participant.
On-line chat and intimacy: public
conversation and personal expressiveness.
Many of the findings of the uniqueness of chatrooms can be seen in the table below which highlights differences between asynchronous on-line communication (chatrooms) and synchronous electronic formats (e-mail, discussion groups).
|
Synchronous |
Asynchronous |
|
time-bound conversation – or real-time
communication |
on-going conversation – not necessarily the
same day |
|
must arrange a specified time to
participate to meet |
can communicate any time |
|
can interact only with those presently
on-line |
can interact with people not presently
on-line |
|
fast and free-flowing conversation may be
hard to follow (much chat is very informal and relaxed) |
slow paced conversation allows more time
for understanding and formulating thoughts (more opportunity for formal,
thoughtful discussion) |
|
multiple conversations occurring
simultaneously may be difficult to follow |
conversations are usually arranged by
topics |
|
one-to-one (IM) allows for individual
conversation; IRC is “public” chat |
private conversation on a one-to-one basis
in e-mail, but not on noticeboards |
|
messages are fleeting; can't be referred to
later except if saved; scrolling back to capture past comments means missing
ongoing talk |
messages are permanent for later reference |
Chatrooms display many of the features of off-line “friendship” gatherings and their talk-formats, including the necessity to display “notable” qualities in the talk performance, to be noticed within the group; to meet the norms of the particular group in order to be an acceptable group member; to know the codes, preferred topics, and specialized locations of chat types, and to be prepared to “meet” and talk regularly, to keep these skills honed and updated. On-line chat appears to demand much the same commitment to sociality as its off-line equivalent.
Chat-types have however already differentiated within the IRC community generally, and can be further defined by the following chat-behavioural categories[10]:
1. Initiating messages which successfully stimulate a new discussion.
Chatters begin discussional threads with the anticipation that others will continue. Continuity stops if no one responds.
2. Initiating messages which fail to stimulate further discussion,
If no one responds, a chatter may attempt to re-introduce the thread, but if no one responds then the thread dies, unless someone else reintroduces it.
3. Continuing messages which cause further discussion.
Responding successfully requires the sorts of w/readerly sensitivity to issues and form which enables chatters to create utterances suited to the group norms – or if possible, extending them further, in the right ways. Responses which simply approve or confirm are acceptable; for instance indicating approval in chat-abbreviation form: “lol” or “J” – but the most responded to are those postings which move a thread forward, whilst also displaying chat-form expertise and creativity.
4. Continuing messages which create branching threads.
A thread can have several thread nodes branching from the root branch, which will then have an overall topic but with sub-discussions. For example in Case Study One there is the main thread of Hurricane Floyd with several branching threads that are still about the storm but a different aspect of it – such as the discussion about Mexican roofers or a thread about sizes of buildings.
As my research dealt with the formal aspects of on-line chat, it did not attempt to explore how the users felt about their time on-line. Studies have been done that show that a majority of chatters “felt like they could jump right in and chat”, or that “chat discussions are too superficial”, or that “chat went too fast because he or she could not keep up with the conversation”, or that “14 out of 15 felt a moderator was needed” [11]. My own research has not identified what people think, but is still able to show that users can indeed “jump right in and chat” – but that most in fact consider the prior postings before doing so. To “write” is to “read” first.
Are these then the major features of on-line chat across all domains, all languages, and into the future? Certainly the technologisation of this form of talk appears to have spread across language groups and cultural behaviours.
Chatrooms currently provide
one of the most universal forms of communicating. By late 2002 there were 4206
Internet cafes in 140 countries[12] and wherever there is an internet café there is the opportunity to
chat on-line. In the
|
|
|
|
The universality of chat-styles can be
demonstrated by examining a chatroom on the Iraq-Net domain, which has
similarities to the chatrooms in all of my case studies. Since this is a
JavaScript chatroom the log could not be captured as text, but is “snapshotted”
direct from its webpage.
(Iraq-Net
chatroom on the day the
The formatting of chat entries is
immediately recognizable, even when in Arabic script, as is the convention of
name-tagging – right-to-left, even in a left-to-right texting language such as
Arabic. The list of users on-line to the right indicates the fusion of cultural
representations available: Anglo or Arabic names in Roman script (<basil>
or <Haedar>); Arabic coded into Roman script with accent markers – not
reproducible in the Word Processing package I am using for this discussion: see
tags 5 and 7 in the list. At the same time, within these selections,
participants are able to code their tags for expressive effect – not only in
the overt
Even where chat participants enter from
different language and cultural contexts, IRC conventions are observable.
Lebanon-based
chatroom
On this Lebanon-based chatroom, which has an instant translator, the
speaker is not demonstrating good command of English. But common abbreviations
are used that would be found in any English-speaking chatroom, such as <how
r u> - and the emoticon < :) > is used in standard form. Even in the
dual-language situation, where threads cross in scripts as well as in topics,
chatters build response relations in familiar ways:
Soso’s careful attempt to suggest that
Moz “serch after help” for his violence finally devolves into reciprocal
personal abuse: “they have to blow u from the world”.
This study has shown that on-line chat communities do take on social agendas as much as they would in person-to-person meetings. Communities of practice can be communities marked by acceptable and non-acceptable behaviours registered at the level of the doubled speech of chat, with its semiotic loadings of meaning and familiarity. In Case Study One it was apparent that there was an ease among the speakers in discussing Mexican roofers in the midst of a discussion of a national emergency. In Case Study Seven the baseball chatroom has a community of practice where the participants are comfortable with their specialised sports talk. Here the participants have not developed an in-depth discussion or a site-specific set of codes - but there are the same practices of greetings, abbreviations and quickly accelerating shifts from mitigation to abuse, as seen across all case studies. Topic and situation it seems, do not prevail against the standard features of on-line chat behaviour.
Having revealed them both a tendency towards community-specific chat behaviours and at least the foundations for “chat universals”, it is time to revisit the research questions which orginally drove this project. How have they contriubted to, or contrained the findings? The five initial focus areas for this study were as follows:
Added to these mixed and incommensurable questions were an equally multi-level listing of my then-current assumptions on online communication:
Having completed the seven differently-focused case studies designed to investigate these issues, it is now possible to see the quite distinctive directions these questions raise and the concomitant ways in which equally distinctive “clusters” of research focus have proven to have arise. The studies move from the fine focus of what can now be seen as technological and methodological questions (turn-taking; meaning-making; observational study) to a comparative emphasis cultural sensitivity in chat and in real-life talk; chat as reflective of real-life discourses; chat in comparison to natural conversation to the “postulatory” emphasis of much broader questions (chat as a useful area for new conversational research theory; chat as a new universal language). My own preliminary thinking indicated a three part study program, moving from existing linguistic-based observational and analytical methods, to an empirical evidence-founded description of actual online “talk” practice, and so to a deeper and richer set of hypotheses relating to online “chat” practices and behaviours. The study has thus begun the first stage of a methodological design for the study of chat – and perhaps of its future technologisations. The ODAM or Online Discourse Analysis Method proposed at the outset has evolved across the seven constitutive Case Studies:
Meaning-making depends on interpretation
Interpretation depends on Habitus and e-Habitus
So the study moves to
CMCs contribute new connective problems (gaps/pauses)
and selections (bridgings/ braidings).
IM is relatively familiar (like conversation):
IRC is complex
So the study moves to
Pragmatics Semiotics
Regulatory online cues/codes Graphic play
command more response Creative
play dominant
So the study moves to
Which talk
forms occur in IRC?
Very indirect forms common, to keep relations OPEN.
Is IRC primarily relational?
So the study moves to
Does the
“relational” work online construct a communication community?
Consensual semiotic play Speech-Acts-as initiation/termination
of
“threads”
So the study moves to
How online communication regulates exchanges. Turn-taking and repair
evident, but more complex than in real life conversation
So the study moves to
How do word selection and order contribute to chat?
Technologisation, creative play, force new “grammars”.
Concision online competency familiarity in online community
relational
work
Building inwards from the broad user-perspectives of Reader Response, examining chat postings as actively received and interpreted “wreaderly” communication, the ODAM has cut four deep and “rich descriptive” wedges from a multi-dimensional, multi-leveled set of chat actions. Beginning simply as an empirically driven aim: to cut into actual instances of chat practice using any existing research methods which could examine how online talk “works”, the study can now be seen to offer in the first instance, a set of interlocking research tools, any or all of which can be picked up, critiqued and re-applied, to be improved upon in future studies, by future researchers.
A second “wedge” or cut from the research findings however establishes that a key direction in linguistic research methodologies: the drive towards establishing the “regulatory” or rules-and-systems elements behind language use, is indeed given a different spin within online talk. Here it proves possible, again and again, from method to method – across the seven case studies “speech communities”, to reveal tightly regulated, recurrent and systematic talk practices, variant from those observable offline, even where there are equivalent interest or topic groups. Wedge 2 indicates those already established online practices which constitute the difference, and even expertise of online chat. They are what suggests that it may well be on its way to constituting its own “speech community/ies”.
But it is wedge 3: those descriptive features which reveal a markedly “open” or “creative” set of communicative behaviours online, which reveal how chat is being constituted. Here the evidence of complexity, semiotic and graphic play, consistent relational focus and creative expertise introduces the dynamic energy of online communication, favouring members and strategies and expertise which reveal skill and creativity and fast-paced interpretive responsiveness. Wedge 3 practices lead us on to the discourse-under-formation of Wedge 4: a discourse demanding continual enactment of familiarity, consensual strategies, relational work, and what CA would call “category maintenance” – of an exclusively “communal” kind.
Online chat, regardless of topic or the specifics of a participant group, appears directed to community itself. Not quite un-agentic as it dis-connects from action, it becomes meta-agentic: more about how to operate than about “what to do”. It is thus, contrary to most contemporary public and media accounts, richer in value than in projects. It is a discourse largely about itself.
After analysis of seven different locations for and modes of Internet chat, this study can be used to suggest that in the chatrooms captured and analysed for the period 1995 to 2001 there is evidence for a new genre of interactive, conversational writing, or “talk-texting”. While awaiting (and perhaps assisting in) the evolution of new methods of analysis for this hybrid communicative form and technologically transitional format, this study has tested a broad range of existing text and speech based analytical techniques, to uncover what we can know of how Internet chat forms currently operate. This genre – or set of genres - must then be regarded as historical and time bound, because the technology of delivery is in itself already changing; for example to include images and sound, so that communication within chatrooms is no longer simply text-based.
Nor is this transience within the format the sole aspect marking the ephemerality of chat. Chatters themselves know that their text may be lost forever; and yet ideas, offerings in creative prose, experiments with personal and social identity, debates and discussions and inquiries and statements are being written, posted and lost from moment to moment: communicative effort that in other more conventional writing genres would be saved, reflectively reassessed and elaborated on. On chatsites text is speech – with all of the misdirection, rapidity of onward flow, focus on the inter-relational, and lack of attention to permanence experienced in speech communities. It is surely significant that at the very moment that this attempt to capture and catalogue at least some of the behaviours of this communicative genre was being prepared for the processes of printing and binding, a major service for the activity of chat was, without warning, curtailed. In September 2003 Microsoft announced the closure of its IRC services.
While IRC services of various types remain available to users, and it seems likely, given the use of chat in various functions from education to industrial design and conferencing, that the genres will in some form prevail, a central moment of chat as a social activity is passing. This document may then, as it has so often suggested, be already on its way to being an historical study. It is important therefore to note that, despite the wide variations in chat purpose and performance found in the seven case studies used here, chat has in its short life evolved a solid central repertoire of communicative techniques. Each case study revealed some unique talk-texting features, but the primary outcome of each of the case studies proved that there were more common features in chat spaces and styles than differences.
There is a new genre of “text-based conversation” text – that found in chatroom postings. The chief characteristics of this genre include recognising how users create a distinctive, but site and talk-category regulated, “textual self” for each chatroom environment they enter. Conversation within chatrooms, without all the cues of previous forms of conversation, changes how we come to know and interact with others, so that new cues based on written conversation become as important as the physical ones which we rely on now. Observational study of chatroom conversation can capture some of the adaptations of standard conversational behaviours to the demands of on-line chat. Observation, description and analysis of chat, using existing analytical methodologies from both text and speech traditions, lets us take a first step towards recognition and analysis of new, hybrid, communicative forms. But it is already possible to uncover a consistency and replicability in findings across chat types and sites, which suggests that chatroom conversation has certain features which make it different from off-line, person-to-person conversation, including the following standard features:
1.
That the author or “speaker” role can be complex, requiring a
rapid mixing of the reader and writer roles, as well as the capacity for multiple
simultaneous engagement in a number of conversational threads – even using
multiple log-on identities.
2.
That chatrooms use an on-line-specific adapted language which
incorporates semi-graphic elements such as emoticons, a specialist
“anti-language” of abbreviations, an expressive range of self-selected
“tailored” settings involving font colours and styles, and the deployment of
pre-formed phrases and ikons as representative of the author.
There is, above all else, an intensified emphasis in chat practice, on the fleeting nature of this texted conversation, since the Internet is itself an unstable, and even experimental, place. This set of studies of contemporary on-line chat behaviours has produced above all else, a foregrounding of the complex, interactive nature of on-line conversation, it demands upfront attention to inter-relational aspects of the talk-texting exchange, signalled in the complex braiding structure of the conversational threads and the inherent discontinuity of talk-exchanges introduced by the technology of the posting software. It is, in itself, a braided study, at the level of description, theorisation, case selection, methodology, and even of presentational design.
And that is, in the final analysis, the nature of the research object: Internet chat. It is likely to illustrate a tendency to conitnaul change – and one issuing ongoing challenges to researchers.
Electronic communication is becoming an established form of communication. However, there are many areas within electronic and online communication which remain unexamined, yet which are undeniably generating new forms of communicative behaviour – and which have potential to feed back into further developments of the Computer Mediated Communication technologies and applications available to today’s and perhaps tomorrow’s communicators.
Among these experientially new social forms of communication evident in online chat, are some curiously invisible forms of communicative practice, qualitatively new and outside the scope of even the broad range of communicative methods of data-capture and analysis used in this study. Research into silence in a chatroom, referred to as lurking (see 2.2.1.3 in this thesis) has not been fully explored. In person-to-person communication, silence does have readable meaning. A participant’s silence in “natural” conversation is observable to both other participants and to analysts. It literally “speaks”, as a conscious act of non-participation. In electronic communication without visual cues, we cannot fully know the purpose of a person’s silence – and in the rapid stream of other conversational postings and responses, may not even notice it. What then is the social or relational impact of online silence? And beyond this more “absolute” silence, what of the uses of lag-times in active participation? Is there for instance an acceptable time lag between chats entries? If a participant is a slow typist, or considers a response for a length of time – or conducts multi-stranded exchanges and so is slower to each response, does this alter the communicative relation? How long can a response gap stretch, before it becomes too difficult to re-connect? In Instant Messenger chats there is a notice that appears that reads the “respondent is writing a reply,” but in multivoiced chatrooms it is impossible to know whether a person is slow in responses, otherwise occupied, or is actively “lurking” for a reason.
The impact of participation in casual
electronic chat on privacy is another area of research that is still under
formulation. While this research shows that chat has tendencies towards the
establishment of casual and even intimate social relations, the literature
suggests that many participants consider this non-proximate and non-physical
social relation to be a secure space in which to interact with a broader than
usual range of others, and to test out various ideas, behaviours, and even
personae.. Attitudes to online security have however altered after aspects of
the 9/11 events were connected to the capacities of the Internet to offer ease
of international communication to terrorist groups. Subsequent security
measures taken in the
Will chatrooms remain an open sphere of communication, or have they lost their “innocence” as a place of play and experimentation?
Research into similarities between chatroom and mobile phone messaging (and image exchange) would seem to be an inviting field of study, with Internet based and phone based codes (especially of abbreviations for instance) appearing to converge. Are they in fact the same? And if differences exist, what might explain them? Study into how mobile phone text-messaging is used to convey meaning in place of a voice message on mobile phones would help to show whether messaging conveyance is as effective with the abbreviations and emoticons used in phone text as speaking. It would also provide some interesting guidance on the possible communicative impact of moving to voice-activation on the Internet – and on some of the ways to interlink aural and text systems. Text-messaging is as short as chatroom text, but is more accessible – a rapid disseminator of the short-form texted message into new communities of users. SMS was launched commercially for the first time in 1995 and by 2002 there were one billion SMS per day exchanged globally (December 2002)[14]. It may prove that my predictions in this study that IRC will be a short-lived technology, may in part be wrong – if SMS and mobile telephony become heir to the form.
|
|
|
Finally, this research raises questions in relation to the “global” or universal use of electronic and online translation software, offering instantaneous contact between speakers of different languages. With electronic chat becoming global, whether online or on a mobile phone, the need to exchange rapid messages across language barriers becomes more pressing. But how accurate are the translation devices that are used for online communication? Online translators are available from services such as
http://www.worldlingo.com who
offer “WorldLingo Chat,” giving one the ability to chat instantly in ten
languages; or Alta Vista’s Babel at http://world.altavista.com/
while at http://www.freetranslation.com/
there is Instant Multilingual Messaging for American On Line Instant Messenger
and SMS Translators that
gives translations from one’s mobile phone. But how accurate are the translated
messages? More importantly, how can one use abbreviations in this environment
and still be understood? The examples of the two phones above are full-sentence-translated
- but what happens with typically shortened chat writing? Imagine the message: Will U wed me
@ Gretna tomorrow pls darling? Translated into Dutch on Alta Vista’s
Further research into
online discursive communication will undoubtedly be driven by rapidly changing
technologies as it becomes more intensified, more complex, more globalised,
subtler and far more widespread.
But no matter the design
outcomes, or the decisions taken technologically, or the platforms chosen for
communicative exchange, we can be sure that users themselves, across an ever
increasing range of language forms, will respond to these new “chat” formats in
ways just as lively and variable; just as practically directed to
communication, yet displaying just as much experimentation and pleasure, as the
Internet chat participants captured here.
911 chat (chat data is on the CD
911.html)
Bondage chat (chat data is on the CD bondage.htm)
CNN News chat on 911 (chat data is on the CD CNN.htm)
Christian chat (chat data is on the CD christian_chat.htm)
[2] Some of the definitions used in CA can serve as a starting point to describe what happens in between these turns. Three terms in common CA practice are gap, lapse and pause. A gap does not “belong” to anyone. It is a place of transition. A gap is a silence; the speaker has stopped speaking, and the next speaker “self selects”. In chatrooms this silence may be occupied by others reading the chat.
When there is a silence, the next speaker has not been selected, and no one self selects, we have a “lapse”. It is only possible to distinguish a gap from a lapse after the event. Again in chatrooms, the next speaker may already be writing the response, reading the previous response, or there may simply be a silence in the same sense as the CA definition.
A pause is silence when the current speaker has selected the next speaker and stopped talking, but the next speaker is silent. A pause is also silence that occurs within a participant’s turn. A pause "belongs" to the person currently designated speaker.
[3] This is a page from
several pages of a CA workshop held on Fridays in 2002 at the State University
of New York at
[4]
For example in the very crowded 911 chat during the World Trade Centre
destructions there were 644
turns and 4833 words of spoken text covering 80 minutes or an average of 8.05
turns per minute. Often there were utterances logged at the same second.
|
595 |
|
tippybond: can someone
field me to another other chats for ny |
|
596 |
|
|
[5] Active Worlds, a Virtual-Reality experience, lets
users visit and chat in 3D worlds that are built by other users. Viewed
12-2002, http://www.activeworlds.com/
ATMOSPHERE,
with Adobe® Atmosphere™. With Atmosphere, users add a third dimension to their
Web experience by creating realistic and immersive environments that offer a
revolutionary approach to content, navigation, community, and communication.
Viewed 12-2002, http://www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere/
EXCITE CHAT, Text-based and graphics-based chat, events, and web
content. Viewed 12-2002, http://www.excite.com/
HABBO HOTEL, Graphics-based chat where the user visits different hotel
rooms or creates his or her own room. Viewed 12-2002, http://www.habbohotel.com/habbo/en/
Moove German-created 3D visual chat program. Viewed 12-2002, http://www.moove.com/
A continually updated list of other 3D chatrooms are at
http://www.thescarletletters.com/Blah/LipSync.html
Viewed 12-2002.
[6] Mann (1997) suggests five characteristics of a wearable computer:
(1.) it may be used while the wearer is in motion;
(2.) it may be used while one or both hands are free, or occupied with
other tasks;
(3.) it
exists within the corporeal envelope of the user, ie, it should be not merely
attached to the body but becomes an integral part of the person's clothing
(4.) it must allow the user to maintain control;
(5.) it must exhibit constancy, in the sense that it should be
constantly available.
Mann, S. (1997) Conveners report of CHI '97 Workshop on Wearable
Computers, Personal Communication to attendees. Viewed 12-2002 at http://www.bham.ac.uk/ManMechEng/IEG/w1.html
[7] Cognitive radio, a
radio that is programmable to send messages on its own is part of the array of
devices for wireless providers, for voice and data communication for the
fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless services beginning in 2004. Viewed 12-2002 http://www.techextreme.com/perl/story/20731.html
[8] Electronic Performance Support System Viewed 12-2002 http://wearables.gatech.edu/EPSS.asp
[9] There are two
claims for the origins of the smiley. One is that in 1972 journalist Franklin
Loufrani created a simple concept for
[10] See, four possible types of message posted to a mailing list McElhearn, 2000, and Gruber, 1996.
[11] The results cited
are from a survey on Assessing Student Learning Outcomes online at http://www.csusm.edu/acrl/imls/Q3Report.htm
Sited online
http://www.ahaa.org/Mediaroom/Roslow%20Research%20Study.htm.
INTERNET USE
[12] Cybercafes
worldwide are added constantly to at http://www.cybercafes.com/
Cited
[13] THE HARRIS POLL® #16,
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=293
[14] See A Brief History of UK Text online at http://www.text.it/mediacentre/default.asp?intPageID=567