Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua raclaw]

i noticed the similarities.  this means we'll probably have to duel to the death
sometime before we're awarded our doctorates.

i think the technical distinction between the two happened sometime in the early
nineties, probably because every other researcher gave the term 'speech
community' a different set of criteria.  i see speech communities as revolving
around shared speaker norms where variation is distributed pretty uniformly
among the group, the way that labov defined them.  communities of practice
revolve more around, well, shared practices than norms, and these don't
necessarily have to be linguistic.  CoPs also tend to be internally defined and
their participants are more self-identified than in speech communities, and it's
a framework that seems immediately applicable to online communities.

i'm really not sure how conscious those representations are, to be honest.  one
example of the overlap is the way in which speakers use screen names as
referentials in face to face with very few exceptions, and you'll find that
given names are only used online.  even then it's used pretty infrequently -
among people who know each other strictly through the site and through meets,
it's noticably used to convey solidarity, but it's also used by people who see
each other face to face outside of the site context.  this kind of goes beyond
overlap, but you get the idea.  so i have no idea whether to consider that a
conscious action right now.  i'd like to think it's a little of both, but i
plead the fifth.

i think identity construction that exists only in the online sphere can be a
conscious effort for many speakers, but i think that goes down the more time
gets spent in that identity.  i also have a soft spot for the people who
completely immerse themselves in these online areas, and i think that's where
the great data is going to come from at first, largely in the area of identity
formation.  i also think you're going to find the most contextual language
shifts coming from them.

it's tough to pinpoint just what practices to analyze, because you're right, the
traditional methodology isn't completely built for this.  i think discourse
markers are a good place to start, in particular in-group slang and any notable
large-scale use of the extralinguistic features available to the medium.  it all
depends on how we want to draw the line between what is and what isn't a
linguistic variable - take the use of ellipses ... for example.  i don't think
there are any studies on its use as a discourse marker, or even how its use is
patterned and predictable, which i'm banking on it being.  it's just like the
word 'like' in valley girl and other contemporary speech styles before
linguists actually gave it a good lookover.  so once we figure out what the
function of the ellipses is, can we consider it a feature of certain online
dialects?  can we even use the term 'dialect' in the online sphere, or does the
omni-representative nature of speech there reduce everything to a sociolect?
can you take a list of chat rooms and potentially draw isoglosses around them?

the lame was another term that labov tossed around for awhile, back in the
seventies, i think.  he used it to reference young black kids who lived in the
same area as the youth gangs he was studying at the time (the jets, maybe?),
but who weren't allowed to socialize with the tough kids, so they never really
learned to speak proper aave.  the term was borrowed from the gang youths who
called such speakers 'lames'.  his arguments that the lames were inferior
because they didn't grab onto the cultural capital of the local aave variety
have since been beat up a bit by academia, but the concept of the lame is still
around - the speakers on the fringe of a particular linguistic variety who never
quite master it.  the CoP actually has a great way to classify these two groups
with the notion of core and peripheral speakers.  i've noticed speakers in a
number of blogging communities who would fall under that title - they're just a
little more than lurkers, and whatever their reasons, they never really make
their way completely into the group.  i'm wondering how their language
practices are reflective of this, if at all.

you're a diligent researcher.  do you think the physical characteristics of the
way that players are logged affect the way that discourse happens?  have you
noticed any speaker shifts that might be attributed to sex or looks?  and by
the by, do we know how ethical the recording and analysis of text from a
multi-server online gaming site would be?  i haven't bothered to look into that
just yet, mostly because i'm hoping for a loophole in the consideration of the
internet as public domain, but i know that my unversity rains hellfire on any
affiliate who publishes without the proper consent forms.  so what kind of
features are you looking for and noticing in these cyberlects?  do you think
their differences are notable enough to constitute something other than a
dialect or sociolect or ideolect?

i'm surprised that formal written english is considered the online standard,
when i've never seen it used in CMC.  for now i'd be wary of calling a
cybervariety anything but a vernacular, which raises the question of how to
divide the speech styles used on the internet into standard and vernacular
varieties.  i wonder if you even can do such a thing - i mean, can you ever
have a prestige dialect that's universal throughout the medium?

i saw keating's e-society course listing while i was browsing through the anthro
department a couple of months ago and salivated just a little.  i thought she
was a godsend but, well, checked out her publications and saw nothing of
interest.  she really drew me into considering applying there anyway, though,
just because her research interests looked so damned cool.  well, her and keith
walters and lisa green in ling, who also satisfy most of my other academic
longings.

and this thing is long enough as is.  i'm quitting here.

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
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