Conversation and Community: Discourse in a Social MUD

[Frank Schaap]

a friend forwared the following announcement to me. looks very interesting.


Frank.

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            Conversation and Community: Discourse in a
            Social MUD (1999, Stanford: CSLI Publications)

            Lynn Cherny

            Conversation and Community: Discourse in a Social MUD is
            an examination of the speech community in an Internet
            "virtual community." Based on ethnographic research on a
            community of users of a MUD, or "multi-user dimension," the
            book describes a closeknit community united in features of
            their language use, shared history, and relationships to other
            online communities. The author invokes the notion of register,
            or the variety of speech adapted to the communication
            situation, in her discussion of how users overcome the
            limitations of the typed, text medium and exploit its
            affordances for comfortable communication. Routines,
            conventional vocabulary and abbreviations, syntactic and
            semantic phenomena, and special turn-taking and repair
            strategies distinguish the MUD community's register.
            Because the MUD is programmable, commands may be
            added which reflect, alter, or reinforce the linguistic
practices
            and culture of the community; competent speakers must also
            know the commands that produce the correct linguistic forms.
            Power structures in the community impact speech practices,
            with the technically empowered being most influential. In
            contrast with much utopian literature about online community,
            this work offers consideration of the role of elites and
            conflicts over membership categories in a discussion of how
            definitions of "community" apply or fail to apply to this
virtual
            ethnographic site. Discussion of methods and ethics for
            online research are included.

            ISBN (Paperback): 1575861542

            ISBN (Cloth): 1575861550

(bron: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/1575861542.html )



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