Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua]

It’s been a busy week.

I bet we’ll have to duel as well… or at least get in a shouting match about some irrelevant point in order to look cool in front of our “colleagues” at some snooty conference. Then I’ll publish an article talking about how your ideas suck, and you will reply with an article about how my ideas suck (and about how I beat my dog). i will respond in kind about your drunken sex orgies with george and babs bush. only then will be ture researchers.  It seems to me that everygreat research has to have a nemesis, so we should agree now to be arch enemies now. actually, it would be nice if we didn't agree on everything.

I think i understand the distinction you’re making between CoP and speech communities (SC). Using you definitions, I think that there are both online, depending on the nature of the mediation (chat, message board, blog, contextualized chat (i.e. in a game), email). The group I’m looking at is not aware of their shared language practices. They are very much aware when people break the norms that they (and those who “speak” like them) have. For instance, I’ve collected a number of examples where people use non-standard writing as a point of insult… Johnny and Sue are arguing about how Sue was rude for killing the guy that Johnny was trying to kill (sounds silly but lots of arguments in
the game are based on this). Sue says “i don give a Shiite bout u so stfu”.  Johnny replies with “Why don’t you try to insult me once you learn how to spell. You’re an idiot!”. So while Johnny and Sue aren’t really aware of it, they’re ascribing to very different linguistic norms. Now, does this place them into a speech community? I’m not entirely sure because there is no sense of shared identity amoung the “standard written people” and  the “I’ll write like I talk people”. But are they a community of practice? Again, I’m not sure because, according to your definition, they certainly are not self defined. Do
you have a reference I can look at for this notion of the CoP?

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“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.”
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We need to do a study to look and see if discourse markers are indeed regular. Do people use ellipsis to the same effect. The colon, the dash, the star… are they context bound (are they different from one website/game/message board to another.) These are the kinds of things we need to figure out in order to actually define the communites we’re looking at, whether we term them CoPs or SCs. In group/out group is also tricky online, because there are people who are very much in group, but who may not post hardly at all. Where do they fit, especially if we’re looking at their language practice?

One way I’ve thought about trying to establish whether or not these kinds of discourse markers are standardized is to first begin with one community and see if there is a standard practice for doing one task. In my case, this would be how people correct their spelling (if they feel the need to do so- this in itself is interesting… when do they change, to who are the talking when they change, doi they change regularly). So I’ve seen a number of ways people do this: 1) *correct spelling, 2) correct spelling*, 3) “er… correct spelling” etc. There are a number of other ways as well.  Are these discourse markers regular? Do the same people do it the same every time? Do they change their marking based on what other people in the group are doing? I think that we have to answer questions like this before we’re really
able to define who our communities (SC or COP) are. In FTF, it’s easier. You listen and the people, they listen to each other, and they sound different. This difference in sound indexes (usually, at least from an emic POV) sex, possibly gender, socio staus, geographical orientation, age, etc. It doesn’t work like that online… or maybe it does. It’s tricky.

Dialect. I want to say that there are online dialects that don’t index sex geography, social class, etc, but they index different things like how people view the internet as a special phenomenon. For instance, those who refer to the internet as an oral/aural space, and those that refer to the internet as a written/reading space. For instance, do people “say” , “did you hear what I said” or “did you read what I wrote”. Do they actually refer to their interactions as “saying” or “writing”. From this, they may think of the interent as aformal or informal space (mirroring either speaking or writing).  These are the kinds of things that people’s language choice indexes online, so I
don’t think we really have dialects here, but I’ve been calling  cyberlects (so that I don’t become labov’s archnemesis). By using this new term (although it’s pretty weak and trendy to throw “cyber” in front of anything internet), we’re able to point to the idea that there is something in common between the online and offline without making this commonality explicit.

Hopefully, we’re not talking about idiolects here… where each person is doing their own thing. If this is indeed what we find, then the implication for our discussion thus far is pretty catastrophic. Why are we predicting that people online will organize themselves linguistically? We have no prescedent, except in FTF theories. So for us, I think that methodologically, the main goal is to show that it is in fact relevant to extend these FTF theories to the internet, as opposed to looking strictly at the interent as a place of text and text mediation.

The lame. Actually, I just read an article that sited this study. I’ll check it out once I get the time. It sounds to me like it definitely has some correlate in the online world. In many cases, I’ll bet the distinction is one that I’ve described above… namely, those who view the interent as a place of writing (and standard academic literacy is what I’m talking about here) while others see it as a place of speaking (with all of the “errors” associated with speech). In many cases, I’ll bet that the lame is lame because they are unable to adopt
non-tradititional writing practices like weird punctuations, smilie useage, capitalization norms, etc. (As an aside, I find people who are meticulous about their grammar and capitalization and punctuation to be a bit stiff online. This ties back into my interest in the language ideologies of other people). So I think that by referring to the concept of the lame, it helps to bring FTF methods/theory in line with what we’re doing online.

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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?
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I don’t really even want to go here. it gets really complex. in some
situations, the people will all know the "real" sex, age, race of their interlocutors. in orhter cases they won't. so their presentation doesn't matter in the first instacne, and it may matter in the second instance. methodologically, i don't know who you would ascertain whether people know each other or not. there are some linguistic clues, but i think you'd have to ask them. this compromises your role as sociolinguistic researcher here i think (but not as a linguistic
anthropologist). the elegance of this context is that i can be both participant and observer, not participant observer. when i'm actually playing the game, i'm not thinking about the linguistics. i'm playing the game, working with my team, have a good time, etc. every once in a while i'll take a screenshot so that i can remeber the "faces" of the people i interact with. then i go back and obsevre the chat logs. by having to ask these people in the middle of the game " so, do you know each other... how long... how ofter do you guys play the game... what's your real life sex, age, etc.", i'm compromising my position as
participant. it also means that everyone else on my team has to stop playing the game and wait for me to do my schpeal.

so, this can get really complicated and I’m not sure how to look at it really. but, I’ve noticed some general trends that are interesting. For instance, I have a couple black toons, and I tend to get comments from other black toons about my outfit, or my story, etc. but I think it’s dangerous to try and draw any conclusions about whether or not the person behind the screen is in fact black. I have about 9 toons on that game: 1) old sea captain, 2) abusive husband turned superhero, 3) abused wife turned superhero, 4) female scientist, 5) female “siren”-type creature, 6) female incan goddess… maybe that’s it. I really haven’t noticed whether or not I’ve been treated any  ifferently as any of these toons. Of course, when I play female toons, at times people make comments about my chest size or the shortness of my skirt. But these don’t really have any thing to do with language (so far as I can see).

What is a bit interesting is that some people will immediately ask you if you’re female IRL (I hate the term by the way but will use it beacsu it’s productive) if you’re playing a female toon. I’ve also been asked for my real name while playing the game so that they could “refer to me accurately”. There are some interesting things going on, but I’m not sure how they tie into language use. and this is really where the kind of previous research on gaming has gone. more of the online social experiment and questions of anonymity. 
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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 acybervariety anything but a vernacular, which raises the question of how todivide the speech styles used on the internet into standard and vernacularvarieties.  i wonder if you even can do such a thing - i mean, can you everhave a prestige dialect that's universal throughout the medium?
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This is an interesting parallel to the language situation in the US. Who exactly speaks the standard American English? While we don’t see people speaking it, it certainly exists (albeit in different forms) in the minds of speakers. In a sense, it’s how people know that they’re speaking a dialect, or that at least they speak something that sounds different from other people. That's a good point about who defines the standard online. I have always assumed that formal written English to be the standard (as well as all the people who write those annoying nettiquete things), and I think that those people who don’t speak in this standard are speaking in vernaculars. Now, is there one vernacular, or do different communities have their own set of norms. This goes back to our question about the definiton of the SC/CoP. But again, there isn’t any work done on establishing what people believe is the standard online. right there is a study. what is the standard for what context? is the 
standard contextually bound? moving back, IS there a standard, or an imagined standard? is there neither (although i don't see how this can be the case). This question really needs to be answered before we can even begin to talk about variation.

*Sigh* so much work to do :(

And our coorespondences could be turned into an publishable article you know :) we'd need to add some references and get some faculty feedback, but i think it may be worth our time. even if we didn't publish it, it would be a good exercise to help solidify our agreements and disagreements and figure out where we want our research to go, and what we want it to encompass (along with what it will not encompass).


-- 
Josh Iorio, 2nd year PhD Student
Department of Linguistics
University of Texas at Austin
519A Calhoun Hall
http://personal.ecu.edu/iorioj

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