Sociolinguistics and CMC

[joshua]

we might want to look into something more modern (maybe a
message board or blog) and then link whatever it is back to the LL. i also have a bit of website making experience (and webspace) so we also have a forum through which to publish our discussions (and refer people to).

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"if you had sue and jackie and jamie and they met together in chat to discuss battle plans and all talked in the non-standard, and you had johnny and willard and don and the met together to talk tactics and they all talked in the standard, well, then you've got two groups you could probably call SC's."
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this is basically what i see, excpet that the groups aren't that homogeneous. the groups i'm looking at are usually mixed (in degrees of nonstandardness) not separated with all the standard speakers in one group and the nonstandard speakers in another. this group structure is similar to one we'd find in some face to face communites (the ellusive ones for the variationists; the pot at the end of the rainbow so to speak... is that how it goes?). i think one of the
fundamental differences between how we see language play out online and how it plays out ftf is related to orientation in space.

ftf communities are necessarily constrained by space so you expect a certain degree of uniformity in their speech (if you look at a large enough sample). online communites aren't usually bound by space, so you'd expect a greater variety (if you're taking the traditional methodlogy and making a direct extention (over time/space). perhaps a batter way to think about it is on a engagement/disenagagement with the online community continuum. i think then maybe you would end up with a more linguistically homogeneous community. imagined communities- i've read a bit (although anderson isn't the name i
associate with it... can't... remember... name). i think it definitely applies to this discussion and to really any discussion of community. who is the italian community in altoona, pa? ask every italian and they give you a different answer. and who is the gay community by the way? i think that methodologically, we HAVE to drop artifical boundaires around communites to study them, but when it comes down to it all communities are imagined.

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"(are you familiar with conversation analysis at all? the notion of repair is relevant as hell for this) is that of stiffness. i don't know how the hell we'd go about proving that empirically, but i think it's truth."
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i had a course during my masters in CA so i've got the historical basics (but have no idea about current trends).

you could prove it thorough observation, interview, and some tricky little games (like make (or find) a conversation where someone corrected and then ask them to decirbe both interlocutors. you'd have to control for factors like topic of the convo, identity of the participants, etc, but you could do it. in the game, it happens all the time (how do people do it in chat, is it consistent/standardized, do users group together in any way). when it happens, i can ask the other people in the group what they think about it, without the speaker knowing that i asked them (no observers pardox). i'll keep my eyes out for ya.

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"in FTF interactions, though, self-correction and other-iniated are
much more the norm and are received somewhat differently.  are the reasons behind this disfluency sociolinguistic, or just constraints of the online medium, or a mixture of both?  is it cultural, in that our educational background has been that much more hellbent on proper written than proper spoken grammar?  and what about the original comparison between sue and johnny?  are their language norms the effect of cultures that are online, offline, both?"
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need to think more on these :)


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"i've personally noted that, at least recently, speakers in the indie/emo scene are overusing the asterisk more than other speakers, which i'm thinking is largely iconic of the group's aesthetic
fascination with stars - ask a scenester with a hip myspace page and they'll typically agree.  i wonder about things like the dash and the semicolon, though.  simple ideolect or social move?  shit if i know.  that might take a whole lot of data to solve."
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that's interesting. i think that we may find them to be idiolects now, but we're still at the beginning of this kind of study and these kinds of communities are still babies (linguistically... and considering how slowly writing has changed up to this point... there may not be "fully formed dialects" for a hundred years or so). the good thing is though that we have a TON of data, and in many cases, it is a complete log of the entire existence of the community.

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is it too out there to say that spoken vernacular is the cmc-text standard?
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not at all. my swiss antro friend makes the same argument. this would lead to finding a bunch of correlates online. which means that you'd should be able to read what someone is writing and be able to "guess" their particular vernacular. needs to be a study done on this.

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so what's your theoretical background?  i know you mentioned taking walters'
intro to socio course this year - is your background mostly in ling anth?  i
started looking through your data, and man, that's a lot of data.  for
starters, you've got a lot to work with on the use of language as group cohesion.  it looks a lot like the IRC logs i've got floating around on my hard drive just waiting to be looked at - i'm thinking this winter break is going to be a nice time to pore over those.  any ideas on what you want to focus on foryour group?
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my background is actually in language acquisition and education. my masters is in applied linguistics, but i've been doing research off and on on cmc since i entered my masters program.

something else i've been toying around with is whetehr or not face to face is the best way to descirbe what's going on in opposite to online. these concepts need to be better defined (much better than IRL at least). shegloff talks about "co-present" interaction. ftf would include videophone or webchat conversations.

do we want to exclude them or include them?



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