Internet discourse

[Tim Ray]

Try looking at some of Susan Herring's work, including the following, which
has several interesting chapters by other authors:

Herring, Susan C., ed.  Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social
and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.  Pragmics & Beyond New Series.  Series edited
by Jacob L. Mey, Herman Parret, and Jef Verschueren.  Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1996.

Good luck.

Tim


Timothy D. Ray, Ph.D.					  voice (602) 965-8599
Department of English					    fax (602) 965-2553
Arizona State University
Box 870302						       Tim.Ray at asu.edu
Tempe, AZ  85287-0302			     http://www.public.asu.edu/~timray

On Sat, 24 Apr 1999, Jeff Santarlasci wrote:

> 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
>