Future Research
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Electronic communication is becoming an established form of communication. However, there are many areas within electronic and online communication which remain unexamined, yet which are undeniably generating new forms of communicative behaviour – and which have potential to feed back into further developments of the Computer Mediated Communication technologies and applications available to today’s and perhaps tomorrow’s communicators.
Among these experientially new social forms of communication evident in online chat, are some curiously invisible forms of communicative practice, qualitatively new and outside the scope of even the broad range of communicative methods of data-capture and analysis used in this study. Research into silence in a chatroom, referred to as lurking (see 2.2.1.3 in this thesis) has not been fully explored. In person-to-person communication, silence does have readable meaning. A participant’s silence in “natural” conversation is observable to both other participants and to analysts. It literally “speaks”, as a conscious act of non-participation. In electronic communication without visual cues, we cannot fully know the purpose of a person’s silence – and in the rapid stream of other conversational postings and responses, may not even notice it. What then is the social or relational impact of online silence? And beyond this more “absolute” silence, what of the uses of lag-times in active participation? Is there for instance an acceptable time lag between chats entries? If a participant is a slow typist, or considers a response for a length of time – or conducts multi-stranded exchanges and so is slower to each response, does this alter the communicative relation? How long can a response gap stretch, before it becomes too difficult to re-connect? In Instant Messenger chats there is a notice that appears that reads the “respondent is writing a reply,” but in multivoiced chatrooms it is impossible to know whether a person is slow in responses, otherwise occupied, or is actively “lurking” for a reason.
The impact of participation in casual electronic chat on privacy is another area of research that is still under formulation. While this research shows that chat has tendencies towards the establishment of casual and even intimate social relations, the literature suggests that many participants consider this non-proximate and non-physical social relation to be a secure space in which to interact with a broader than usual range of others, and to test out various ideas, behaviours, and even personae.. Attitudes to online security have however altered after aspects of the 9/11 events were connected to the capacities of the Internet to offer ease of international communication to terrorist groups. Subsequent security measures taken in the US to detect terrorist activity online may mean that chatters become more careful with their “talk”. In a Harris Poll conducted in April 2002 the following findings indicate that the US public, which had actively favoured monitoring of Iternet communications by their government, is turning back towards an unregulated system:
Will chatrooms remain an open sphere of communication, or have they lost their “innocence” as a place of play and experimentation?
Research into similarities between chatroom and mobile phone messaging (and image exchange) is becoming an inviting field of study, with Internet based and phone based codes (especially of abbreviations for instance) appearing to converge. Are they in fact the same? And if differences exist, what might explain them? Study into how mobile phone text-messaging is used to convey meaning in place of a voice message on mobile phones would help to show whether messaging conveyance is as affective with the abbreviations and emoticons used in phone text as speaking. It would also provide some interesting guidance on the possible communicative impact of moving to voice-activation on the Internet – and on some of the ways to interlink aural and text systems. Text-messaging is as short as chatroom text, but is more accessible – a rapid disseminator of the short-form texted message into new communities of users. SMS was launched commercially for the first time in 1995 and by 2002 there were one billion SMS per day exchanged globally (December 2002). It may prove that my predictions in this study that IRC will be a short-lived technology, may in part be wrong – if SMS and mobile telephony become heir to the form.
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Finally, this research raises questions in relation to the “global” or universal use of electronic and online translation software, offering instantaneous contact between speakers of different languages. With electronic chat becoming global, whether online or on a mobile phone, the need to exchange rapid messages across language barriers becomes more pressing. But how accurate are the translation devices that are used for online communication? Online translators are available from services such as http://www.worldlingo.com who offer “WorldLingo Chat,” giving one the ability to chat instantly in ten languages; or Alta Vista’s Babel at http://world.altavista.com/ while at http://www.freetranslation.com/ there is Instant Multilingual Messaging for American On Line Instant Messenger and SMS Translators that gives translations from one’s mobile phone. But how accurate are the translated messages? More importantly, how can one use abbreviations in this environment and still be understood? The examples of the two phones above are the full sentence translated - but what happens with shortened typical chat writing? Imagine the message: Will U wed me @ Gretna tomorrow pls darling? Translated into Dutch on Alta Vista’s Babel it comes back as Zal U wed me @ morgen pls darling Gretna ? Would the receiver get the message correct? The translator at WorldLingo.com translates it differently: U wed me @ zal morgen pls darling Gretna whilst freetranslation.com interprets it as Wiedde wens U mij @ Gretna morgen pls lieveling? All three translations are different, with different meanings. If something as short and simple – yet as socially crucial! - as this message is translated incorrectly, what is needed to exchange meaning in international electronic devices? Can translation between languages also accommodate an online code of abbreviations which is informal and non-standardised – and to date, unrecorded?
Further research into online discursive communication will undoubtedly be driven by rapidly changing technologies as it becomes more intensified, more complex, more globalised, subtler and far more widespread.
But no matter the design outcomes, or the decisions taken technologically, or the platforms chosen for communicative exchange, we can be sure that users themselves, across an ever increasing range of language forms, will respond to these new “chat” formats in ways just as lively and variable; just as practically directed to communication, yet displaying just as much experimentation and pleasure, as the Internet chat participants captured here.
THE HARRIS POLL ® #16, April 3, 2002 online at
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=293
See A Brief History of UK Text online at http://www.text.it/mediacentre/default.asp?intPageID=567