Electronic Discourse: Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space

This book examines interactive electronic discourse, exposing use of language that has the immediacy characteristic of speech and the permanence characteristic of writing. The authors created an asynchronous mainframe conference for language and linguistics classes in which they presented students with the task of analyzing the language used in original newspaper reports of the 1960s Civil Rights Sit-Ins. The authors observed how students wrote to each other across a wide range of social and virtual settings, how they built a real, if short-lived community within and across campus boundaries, and how they handled conflict while avoiding confrontation on sensitive issues of race and power. The result is a study that details how people use language when their social interaction is exclusively enacted through text on screens, and how their exchange is affected by computer conferencing. The students who wrote in the electronic conferences faced two interrelated tasks: participating in a multiparty "conversation" and negotiating the individual identities they presented to one another in their virtual space. Individual writers used their own idiolects to influence the form and content of electronic discourse, adapting their own tacit knowledge of conversational strategies and written discourse to the new medium, as they created a real, although temporary, community. In the electronic universe, writers adapt conventions of oral and written discourse to their own individual communicative ends. Electronic discourse, sometimes called computer mediated communication, presents us with texts in contact, and through those texts, their writers. Intertextuality in electronic conferences replaced a variety of conversational conventions. This book examines evidence for change, some trace of being and human interaction in virtual space, a domain where footprints are not in moondust but in ether.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1:// A first look at electronic discourse On defining electronic discourse Writing that reads like conversation Speaking and writing: Biber's dimensions Multidisciplinary perspectives Selected approaches to discourse analysis Description of the corpus Using the concordance: An example 2:// Context and contact in electronic discourse Repetition in electronic conference discourse An emergent register Electronic conferences as "Town meetings" Changing contexts within a conference Some purposes behind repetition in electronic discourse 3:// Entering the conferences: Challenges of time and space Electronic writing: The "early" period The subject of the conferences: What students brought as "given" Setting and participants: A closer look Accessing the conference: The challenge of spaces Space and time in the arrangement of conference texts The impact of realigned times and settings on monitor screens The challenge of expectations about genre Replies as new frames 4:// Titles: Form and function in electronic discourse The impact of conference topography Conventions of direct address in titles Titles as suggestive of self-disclosure The titling game and its impact Managing community: Software and moderator impact 5:// Defining the territory Individual views of the territory Guarding the territory Syntactic cues: Personal pronouns It behaves differently Genderin the territory Brent's territorial moves 6:// Taking a stance: Text, self, and other Aspects of modality Modality: A range of definitions The individual and the text Verb classes Contexts and modal verbs A change in audience 7:// Aspects of emulation Popularity and rhythm Moving to reflexive writing Emulation across distance and space in the Transparent Conference Adjacency-pairs in the Transparent Conference Frame and focus in Topic 2 Some features of audience in the Transparent Conference Flocking behaviors in mainframe conferences 8:// Emulating a strategy: The rhetorical question Features of rhetorical questions Rhetorical questions from the Stand-Alone Conference Rhetorical questions in the Transparent Conference 9://Conclusion Going across local boundaries Reading the text after the conference A notion of virtual community A final comment Appendices References Index