2. Literature Review

2.0 Abstract

In examining the literature of conversational analysis and related techniques for describing language in use, it is my intention to discover what these techniques can tell us of how chatroom ‘talk’ works. In what ways is chatroom ‘talk’ similar to or different from natural conversation? Is it, even within its short history, one or many communicative forms? Are there common, “core” elements, present on all web-based chat sites? Are there specialist elements on specialist sites – and if so, is this limited to lexis, or does it extend to other elements of “texted talk”? Firstly I will explore the research on electronic chatrooms that is available, seeking existing insights into how texted talk works, and whether these can be extended by a fuller deployment of any of the language in use theories I have examined. Secondly I will draw on the current theories of conversational analysis to see whether it is possible, and useful, to establish a theoretical framework and methodological focus for examining how dialogue in electronic talk operates as a system of social meaning making within cyberculture.

I will critique books and articles by researchers in linguistics and social anthropology which pertain to the special features of chatroom discourse, including, in the field of Reading-Response theory: Wolfgang Iser (1978, 1989, 2000), Stanley Fish (1980, 1990), Umberto Eco (1979, 1986, 1995) Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1997) and J. Kristeva (1980); Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC): Charles Ess (1996, 2000), Mark Poster (1988, 1990, 1995) and Michael Stubbs (1996, 1998); Semiotics: Roland Barthes (1970, 1975, 1977, 1981), Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), M. A. K. Halliday (1978, 1994), Robert Nofsinger (1991) and Chandler (1999, 2001); Speech Act Theory: John Austin (1962), John Rogers Searle (1965, 1969) and Deborah Schiffrin (1987); Discourse Analysis: Deborah Tannen (1989, 1998) and N. L. Fairclough (1982, 1989, 1993, 1995) and Conversational Analysis (CA): Paul ten Have (1999), Suzanne Eggins & Diana Slade(1997), Donald Allen and Rebecca Guy (1974), Erving Goffman (1959, 1971, 1974, 1981), G. H. Mead (1934) and Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff (1974). Theorists are not strictly always in one ‘camp’. For example, Eco I discuss both in Case Study 1, where I use Reading-Response theory to analyse the chatroom dialogue, and in Case Study 3, where I use Semiotics in looking at my data. Here I aim to construct a both a general theory of how the interactivity of chatroom talk-texting relates it to both the “readerly” or the “lisible” elements of dialogism, emergent in mid-twentieth-century reading theory; and an account of how far the socio-linguistic theories of post-Saussurian language studies (including especially “speech act” theory, Halliday’s “Systemic and Functional Linguistics”, and Harvey Sacks’s “Conversation Analysis”) can provide explanations of the communicative strategies observable in a chatroom’s (quasi) synchronous talk-texting.

In the more specific area of direct or primary research into chatroom discourse, I have located and systematised more than three-hundred articles online on chatroom communication, seventy-one of them discussed in this literature review. In particular, I wish to re-focus the direction of many of these studies, from the specifics of their research goal – most often to “explain” a particular chatroom “culture” – to the more generalised and methodological goals of this study. For example, though much has been written about forms of person-to-person communication in the areas of cybersex, cyber-communities, and gender online, (Cicognani, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000; Rheingold, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000; Turkle, 1982, 1984, 1995, 1996 and Bays, 2000), very few researchers have applied those conversational analysis theories which are used to examine real-life social interactions to chatroom conversation itself. While chatroom analysis is a rapidly growing area of academic research and more is available online daily, most studies are directed away from general studies of this type [1].

2.1 Introduction

This literature review is an overview of the literature found both in print and accessed online. The nature of my research, and the nature of rapidly changing technology have meant that the majority of sources have been found online, and furthermore, that some of these sources are no longer available. I have included copies of all e-journal articles in my appendix for this reason.

To establish means for rigorous analysis, I "export" my investigation of chatroom talk into the established linguistic methodologies of work on offline analytical linguistics. There is a growing body of print material on hypertext, the Internet and the World-Wide-Web but there has been little work done on analysis of interactive online texted talk, which is as seemingly borderless as other on-line texted realms. My field literature borrows from previous research into MUDs[2], (Multi User Dimensions) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), which I have discussed in the introduction to this thesis (1.3.5 MUDs vs. IRC).

Overall, work in this new area of study postulates two major features of the field:

1. That new ways of thinking about conversation will emerge with the growing widespread use of computers as a form of communication. (Charles Ess, 1996; Michael Stubbs, 1996).

2. That chatrooms involve exchange more hastily done than in any other form of electronic talk-texting, and so therefore more likely to respond to and reflect back the particular pressures and influences of on-line communication (Spender, 1995).

But how might such new forms of communication be captured, or new ways of thinking about communication itself be constructed? E-scholarship itself has provided one possible answer, in what is becoming known as the “re-mediation hypothesis” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). Working to find ways to...