Sociolinguistics and CMC

[nerd_core]

ok, so i read through your prior josh-josh discussions and want to make some general comments, even though i have more specific comments recorded on my laptop. interestingly, the wifi at this INTERNET RESEARCH conference is not working. so,  pity me, i'm in some makeshift computer lab they've set up for us so we don't all go through e-withdrawal, but i couldn't wait to write you back with some comments, so here they are in no particular order of importance or relevance. 

1. HOT-DAMN I'M SO EXCITED THAT SOME PEOPLE ARE THINKING THE SAME WAY ABOUT THESE THINGS AS I AM TRYING TO.  whew. just had to say that.

2. although it seems like there's no research out there, there is more than it sounds like you guys might think there is. NOT on sociolinguistics of CMC per se, albeit, but on CMC more generally, and a lot of it intersects with language whether or not that's its explicit aim. what we must do is make it an explicit aim.  i gave a talk to our ling anth seminar group at school a few weeks ago on "socio/linguistic issues in CMD" (=CM Discourse rather than Comm, a term i wish we'd all switch to), and i realized as i was preparing
it that one of my main goals in making the talk, in indeed doing a lot of the research (or dreaming about doing a lot of the research) i'm doing (or dreaming about), is to say to linguistics, "Guys! Wake up! There's this environment of discourse going on that we're not paying any attention to, and there's no good reason taht should be the case, and moreover there are explicitly good reasons why that should NOT be the case. All these other fields are doing internet studies, when really what people use the internet for is uses of LANGUAGE, so why are we so laggard here?"

3.  that said, there are a few people doing cmc linguistics/cyber
linguistics: susan herring, naomi baron, john paolillo, ylva hard af
segerstad, mark warschauer, therese ornberg, david crystal (well, he's good at talking about "digital dialects" and popularizing things, but not really doing anything empirical), simeon yates, justine cassell...i'm attaching an in-progress bib i've got going for CMC sources, which lists things not only from a linguistic standpoint and not only pertaining directly to CMC, but things which are important to have as background for CMC studies in general (like linguistics and writing, for instance - also rare, but there's a little out there). "in-progress" means that it uses a bunch of different citation styles because it's culled from all manner of different papers i have lying around and cutting and pasting from various sources, so it's kind
of messy in that regar.

4. there's also more precedent to this kind of stuff than we sometimes feel compelled to admit. this is something i'm working on training myself to keep in mind whenever i find something totally exciting about online comm. and want to consider it new. for constraining language within casual written media, we have some precedents in telegrams and TTY. for email, we obviously have snail mail. for some of the things that are used in written discourse online, like abbreviations, acronyms, etc., we have people's handwritten notes in which they've always used shortcuts for themselves. such things are
also used in yearbook signings (an increasingly interesting thing to me that i really want to do a study on) - "TTYL" is taken straight from my 4th grade yearbook. that said, this stuff IS different. for one, it's never been so publicly shared nor so widespread, nor so embedded in daily life for a lot of people. the embedding part is a really important one.

5. i am so glad you mentioned benedict anderson. i wrote a paper last year on friendster testimonials as identity disourses and used anderson's notion of imagined communities in the analysis. but the way i used it was thus: it seems really applicable to the internet on the surface, but actually internet communities have this weird property of being articulated, bounded, in a way that many offline communities are not. that is, you SAY you're a member of a newsgroup, or a social networking site, or a bulletin board, by establishing a screen name, posting, etc. these communities are explicitly NAMED and often organized around a specific goal or task. and you usually have access to a list of the whole community, all members, at any given time.  so in a lot of ways, communities online are more explicit than communities offline. but that gets into what your definition of "community" is, obviously. stevev jones has a good article applying anderson to the internet in one of his books 
- it's listed on the bibliography. (have i used the word "explicit" too much already? what the hell. i have no idea why that keeps coming up.)

6.  so many of the things you mentioned looking at are things i've wanted to do as well: ellipses (i am SO glad you're doing something on ellipses, now i can do something on them later and compare!), other punctuation, "textual performatives" as you called them, though i've usually just considered those representations of nonverbals (:::lauren hugs josh:::), dialect, etc. exciting, exciting, exciting stuff. what needs to start happening - which you talked about and which i tried to do in this apostrophes paper - is to define what the possible linguistic variables are in cmc. it's a totally different ballgame. not only has sociolx not done stuff on cmc, but it hasn't even done stuff on writing - and right now, taht's what's REALLY screwing up any attempt at trying to do cmc work within a theoretical context - there is simply almost NO precedent for looking at written language in the same way we look at speech. which is of course part of why this is so exciting, and part of why 
cmc is so important.

7. let's start a group blog on cmc lx. now. i've wanted to do this for a long time but lacked cohorts.

i will have more to report when i return from the conference, or possibly later in the conference - a lot of exciting sttuff going on here, for sure.  take care! more coherence is promised in future communiques.

lauren

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