Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua]

I started off writing responses, and then realized that my responses were almost identical to what you said. We’re very much on the same page with all of the issues you discussed.

A couple questions:

1) You make a distinction between a ‘speech community’ and a 'community of practice’. What’s the distinction and why do you make it?

2) You hypothesize that language practices will overlap in the blogging community you’re looking at because the representations online is the one used offline: A) how much of their representation (both on and offline) is conscious? B)  what do you hypothesize for other situations (i.e. where the online and offline are different representations), and C) what, specifically, are the language practices you’re analyzing? (this is particulary interesting because this is precisely the area in the methodology where there is no
tradition. In FTF studies, this would be things like register, dialect, metalinguistic stuff, etc.)

3) What’s “the lame”?

And some answers:
1) I’m using the rpg as a source of collecting naturalistic data. The game has a pretty complex system of chat windows. For instance, you can chat to one person, to your team, to everyone on the server, to everyone on all the servers, etc. So if I play the game for an hour, I have access to hundreds of lines of text in a variety of situations. All of this is logged by the game. I also have access to the exactly what the people look like (broken down to a mathematical-like formula by the game… this amounts to a log of all of their physical qualities
like height, weight, sex, broadness of shoulders, shape of nose, etc. It’s also pretty interesting because I have every interaction I’ve ever had with the people on the game. So my entire relationship with them is logged… Everything I know about them and everything they know about me. I’ve tried to play the game for an hour a day for the past 6 months, so I have a TON of data. I’m trying to convince one of my buddies in computational linguistics to develop some kind of data miner for it. I’ve haven’t even begun to figure out a system for an
efficient analysis.

Most of the studies I’ve seen using games are pretty antiquated. Mudds and moos are and will always be very inaccessible to most people. People like flashy and they’re by definition the antithesis of flashy. Their flashy counterpart is the massivly multiplayer online rpg (mmorpg). So while there’s no problem with these studies, they target a very specific kind of person behind the box. Modern rpgs are played by lots and lots of people (tens of thousands at a time playing one game) from different backgrounds. And like the mudds, there are
people who exist in these games, who have no life outside of the game. Some are housewives, some work in factories, some work behind the computer all day. These are the people who really interest me. These are the people who I see creating the “cyberlects”, and with them, the norms of use. There is already an online standard… formal written English. And there’s definitely evidence that this isn’t the only variety of English being used online. So the rpg (City of Heroes to be specific) is place to watch language (and the representations that are
using it), learn language (new lexical entries, new syntax (more akin to verbal), new metalanguage), and participate with the language.

2) there are a couple people in anthro here at UT who are generally interested in cmc and technology/society issues. Elizabeth keating and …. I can’t remember his name now but he wrote an article calling for anthro to look seriously at online communites. Like you, I’m kinda on my own here. Keating is trained as a descriptivist (austronesian languages) but is currently switching research paradims. I’m hoping to grab onto her coattails a bit as she makes the transition. So she hasn’t published anything in cmc yet. She’s teaching a course this semester that’s called e-society: computer-mediated-communication.
It’s pretty sweet, although we’re approaching it from an anthropological point of view. We’re reading information theory, which is basically about how people are hooked socially on technology (text messaging, cell phones, cmc, etc.). we also have a couple  sociolinguists (one specializing in qualitative work and one in quantitative). So I’m hoping to be ok, but I’m not sure how much guidance I’ll get.

3)career wise, I think we’ll be fine because there aren’t very many of us doing this kind of work and the data shows that internet users are growing exponentially every year all over the world. The most  interesting people are yet to get online. White middle class English speaking straight men again make up the majority of the online power hierarchy. I’m actually excited to be at the beginning of something new. And it has private sectior importance as well. You could do research for some marketing firm. Uou could work on development of
new cmc technology (or make existing tech better). You could get hired in any number of departments (socio, anthro, ling, computer science, information science, etc.). it’s relatively easy to get published in this field I’d imagine (Some of the articles on jcmc are a bit weak I thought.) so I’m not really that worried… but I don’t tend to get worried about things too much either. 

Whew.  

-- 
Josh Iorio, GRA
Graduate Student Instructor Program
MAI 2206 || 512.232.1773
Division of Instructional Innovation and Assessment
1 University Station, G2100
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX   78712-0225
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http://www.utexas.edu/academic/diia


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