THESIShome ~ Abstract.html/pdf ~ Glossary.html/pdf ~  Introduction.html/pdf  ~ methodology.html/pdf  ~ literature review.html/pdf ~  Case Study 1.html/pdf ~ 2.html/pdf ~ 3.html/pdf ~  4.html/pdf ~ 5.html/pdf ~  6.html/pdf ~  7.html/pdf ~ discussion.html/pdf  ~ conclusion.html/pdf ~ postscipt.html/pdf ~ O*D*A*M.html~ Bibliography.html/pdf ~  911 ~ thesis-complete.htm~ Terrell Neuage Home Appendixes ~

fUTURE STUDIES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

This study of online communication situated in chatrooms has revealed the importance of investigating this medium, at this time. The chatrooms of the late 1990s were at the beginning of a shift in texted electronic communication to a system where meaning exchange is often fused between the text-messages of the sender and the receiver – or, given the text basis of the electronic exchange, the writer and the reader. The resultant complexity of this new electronic means of communication has the potential to change or at the least to interrupt the otherwise casual “flow of conversation” used in Internet chat, to a point that a new language and a new set of behaviours have emerged.. In order for there to be a means of interpretation of these parts conversational, part text exchanges between participants, close and detailed observations are required. But in order to extend analysis beyond mere observation, the full repertoire of analytical theories and methodologies for examining “talk”, and text construction and exchange, must be pulled into the ambit of the investigation of online chat. Internet relay Chat in all its variability has one standard feature: it is a hybrid or “fusion” form of communication. It requires hybridity and fusion in its analysis.

In this study I started in a purely empirical mode, “capturing” seven primary chatroom dialogues. I chose several of these sites randomly, based on the ease of their access. As the study progressed, I chose several other chatrooms because of my slowly focusing interest in the varying “talk relations” I was encountering, and my suspicion that chat users were themselves make chatroom selections by anticipating the online social relations offered in various sites, according to the subject matter of the chatroom as signaled in its name. While this sometimes was or sometimes was not a safe prediction, it extended the range of sites, techniques and behaviours I was able to collect and analyse, and required only occasional supplementation with sampling from sites outside the core selection. For the most part, this study concentrates on seven case studies, each case study being based on a saved piece of representative dialogue from one very distinctive chatroom. Together, these case studies demonstrate features peculiar to on-line chat which make it very different from the face-to-face chat of everyday conversation – but also from any forms of text-based communication. In the broadest sense chatroom “texted talk” combines face-to-face chat with text-based communication.

There are however a number of central and distinctive features that disrupt what might otherwise traditionally be considered a simple conversational communication model. There is far more in Internet Relay Chat than can be explained in a “sender-message-receiver” relation. Most obviously such features include for instance the use of avatars to replace or to represent the physically absent “speaker”; text-graphic “emoticons” as interfaces to replace words or aural elements representing emotions; the fleeting motion of scrolling text; silence or “lurking” by participants as itself a form of message: the complex “braiding” and overlap of various conversational “threads” and the need to compensate and interpret discontinuity of posted messages; as well as new forms of word structure, such as standardised abbreviations and idiosyncratic mis-spellings. Each of these – and the many more complexities each of them conceals – signals major shifts in the communicative activities of online “chat” communities.

To test ways in which these new communicative forms might be examined and understood, in this study, I capture and sample a moment in time of on-line exchange behaviours, and look at them through the lens of a wide range of linguistic and discourse theories. Using these theories demonstrates how, despite the differences in “chat” conducted on-line from that carried out face-to-face, on-line chat and “natural conversation” share some features. Analytical theories developed for inquiry into both conventional speech and print-based text reception, can be used for examining on-line chat, and are able to produce findings which help explain these new communicative acts. The seven case studies and the theories and associated methodologies used to assess are as follows:

Other chat samples saved and referred to in this thesis to enhance and support points include:

Electronic communication has opened a new realm for communication – both as necessary information exchange, and as social play and psychological development of self/selves. With continually evolving innovations enabling new communicative activities, we must anticipate new and unpredictable – even as yet indescribable – communicative behaviours and understandings. By applying more detailed forms of textual analysis to the actual examples of computer mediated communication (CMC) my project sets out to detect new modalities as they evolve.

Chat on-line is “global” only to the extent of accessing many varying “local” structuring references. A “global” or universal “chat speak” is not evident in on-line talk selections – for all the emergence of expressive repertoires in netiquette, emoticons or IRC/SMS abbreviation. In this study, I suggest that what is evolving here is not – or not yet – separated from speech in the physical world, to the extent of disconnection from dominant discursive framings: that on-line texted-talk “chunks” its interactions in familiar ways. I am also suggesting however that at the level of “chat” or interpersonal interactivity, new behaviours abound.

Chatroom conversation is becoming a phenomenon which warrants both analytical and historical study. It is also however showing signs, because of rapidly changing and evolving technologies, of being a short-lived genre. Replication of this thesis and my research is already difficult, due to the changing technologies of delivery on the Internet – another matter that I explore further in this thesis. This makes such a study timely, both in its contribution to developing ways of understanding online speech behaviours, and maybe even developing later technological applications for on-line “chat”, as well as for its capacity to capture and preserve an influential moment of our communication history.

In sum, this study is embedded not within any one specialist tradition of language-based research, but seeks instead a general overview of chat usage, deploying more focused linguistic-based techniques to approach specific issues, within specific sites. Overall, it remains an ethnographic study, collecting, observing and reporting on the specific social and cultural practices of a specified population: on-line chat participants.
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