Internet discourse

[Jeff Santarlasci]

I am currently looking for research that deals with internet chat room
discourse for an analysis piece I am working on. What follows is the opening
of my paper. Can anyone suggest studies that might have a bearing on the
angle I'm taking? Thank you for your time and assistance.



Face Among the Faceless: Politeness in Chat Room Discourse

    The Internet gateway site, Yahoo!, has 47 million registered users, a
population about equal in size to Spain and Portugal combined. Each day,
sites in the Yahoo! network are accessed by approximately 235 million
people, a group of visitors just slightly smaller than the population of the
United States of America. One of the most popular sites offered by Yahoo! is
their Yahoo! Chat, a collection of cyber meeting rooms visited by an average
of XXX million users (still searching for the correct figure) everyday.
While certainly large enough to merit attention on their own merits, these
Yahoo! numbers represent only a portion of the chat room discourse (CRD)
that occurs daily (estimated at 50 million users NYT) at a wide range of
sites on the Internet. Given the number of participants, and the increasing
acceptance of CRD as a "mainstream" mode of communication, an inquiry into
the unique nature of Internet chat seems a timely, if not somewhat overdue,
undertaking.
    That CRD is a unique mode of discourse is, of course, an arguable claim,
but not an unsupportable one. It is fundamentally a discourse of paradox.
CRD is oral in its immediacy, and yet is simultaneously mediated by the act
of writing. Participants simultaneously experience proximity (that is, they
inhabit a "room" together) and distance (their bodies my be on different
sides of the globe). The term itself, "chat," indicates that CRD would
likely characterize itself as more oral, possessing more in common with
face-to-face discourse than with text based discourse, and yet it is
precisely the face that is missing.
    In this paper, I will explore the implications of this paradoxical
nature of CRD in relation to issues of politeness as formulated by Brown and
Levinson. Given the unique nature of CRD, will participants interact with
one another in a manner predictable by the framework of politeness
strategies as outlined by Brown and Levinson? Is there something unique
about the oral/textual nature of CRD that would predispose participants to
choose strategies fundamentally different from those typically chosen in
more conventional conversational interactions? In short, how are we to
characterize face among the faceless?

Jeff

Jeff Santarlasci
University of Idaho
Brink Hall 106
(208) 885-6156
sant2535 at uidaho.edu
Jeff Santarlasci
University of Idaho
Brink Hall 106
(208) 885-6156
sant2535 at uidaho.edu