Britney
Spears Chatroom analysis using semiotics, pragmatics and semantics Terrell Neuage
Last edited
PhD thesis
~
CASE
STUDY THREE
CS
3.3.1.2 3D virtual chats and icons
CS 3.1 Introduction
In Case Study
One, using analysis drawn from Reader-response theory, I explored the duel role
of authorship and readership and argued that the writer needed to be the reader
of the text in order to contribute meaningful discourse. The author does not
have to read in order to write or ‘speak’ in a chatroom, as he or she could
just enter a chatroom and enter text into the chatroom, then leave. However,
for shared discourse the writer has to read to produce a “response worthy”
response. Chatrooms are, to this extent, dialogic. But that definition alone
cannot cover the intricacies of chatroom discourse.
In Case Study
Two the technology that makes chatroom discourse possible was introduced.
Computer-Mediated communication (CMC) involves the study of the process of
using computers to exchange information.
However, without significance being applied to the characters on the
screen during some process of reception, the “communication” of CMC cannot have
a purpose. In this case study I combine awareness of both how information is
mediated by CMC, and how users (reader-writers) interpret that information.
This chapter will look at how meaning is read from keyboard characters and
iconic representatives, and especially in the
textual configurations used in chatrooms, which often cannot be read as
traditional text. The current CMC keyboard also now enables the user to upload
an image which can be used as a representation of him or herself, or as a
visual “cue” or “prop”, in the theatrical sense. Analysis of chatroom practice
and communicative “production and reception” thus requires a visual as well as
verbal-textual analysis.
As I argue
throughout my case studies, here the only way to identify communicative intent
in the chatroom is through first attempting to identify what the chatter is
doing in the room. The only cues that are provided are the utterances and the
username. For example a chatter with the username <guest-MoreheadCityNC>
is telling people that he or she has something to do with
Given this
tendency towards user-identification with the topics and spaces of chat, what then might we expect from the
chat-expressiveness of a group self-selecting into a Britney- focused chatroom?
I saved 70 turns from such a chat in
March 2000, (appendix a3 http://se.unisa.edu.au/a3.html).
At the time I knew little about Britney Spears except that she was another pop
idol among children. I chose this particular chatroom at random out of a list
of thousands on the popular Talkcity chat server, at a period when it was among
the top of search engine Google’s
selections for chatroom servers. Talkcity.com went out of business in early
2002, making it impossible to replicate this series of chats – however the
tendencies displayed on this site at this time and shown in this sample,
reappear on other similarly focused spaces.
To capture
both the self-aware linguistic expressiveness and the multi-layers of identity
affiliation processed in the chat in such rooms, I will use semiotics alongside semantics and pragmatics. In a
space centred on the image or style culture of a popular, almost iconic figure
– and especially of one so successfully appealing to young audiences deeply
immersed in adolescent and pre-adolescent self-formation, my focus will be on
the ways users take up and rework cues offered by the celebrity image, the site
itself, and the talk texts and image-props of other users. I hope here to
introduce a socially embedded reading of chatroom communication, examining not
just the textual surfaces, but recognizing, where possible the social origins
and outcomes of such otherwise symbolic activity as celebrity-centred chat.
CS 3.1.1 Questions
‘Can a
celebrity’s name as title of a chatroom create a difference in dialogue in
chatrooms?’
My first
question in researching the dialogue in this chatroom cannot be answered by any
form of statistical analysis. People
pass in and out of chatrooms, and unless there is a popup box with questions to
answer – and some constraint on the honesty or accuracy of replies - there is
no way to know who the chatters are, or why they are in a particular chatroom.
Even with forms put on a site for people to answer there is no way of knowing
whether the answers are accurate, as anyone can put in any information they
wish at any time – with single or multiple responses (Danet, 1998; Bromberg,
1996; Turkle, 1996). However, because the chatroom in Case Study Three had the
name of a celebrity and could be presumed to be limiting the group likely to
find the chat topics appealing, the possibility was produced for an open or
empirical study of whether such a limited group might display special
discursive or chat-behavioural characteristics, exclusive to such a
self-selected group; I posed the question, ‘Can
a celebrity’s name as title of a chatroom create a difference in dialogue in
chatrooms?’
To some extent
this proved to be a naïve question. Before I entered this chatroom and copied
the log for the ten-minute 70 turn discourse, I believed the talk would be
solely about the person whose name the chatroom bears: a ‘Britney Spears
Chatroom’. An extensive and growing literature of fan culture suggests however
that this is rarely if ever the case (Jenkins, 1992; Modleski, 1982; Baym,
1993, 1998). The very role of the celebrity in identity formation (Lewis, 1992;
Schickel, 1985; Giles. 2000) suggests that much of the talk in fan discussions
will be about life and lifestyle for the devotee. Work on use of soap opera
texts for instance by Modleski (1982) and Mary Ellen Brown (1994) shows adult audiences
creating continuities between the narratives and characters of the serials, and
their own and their friends’ lives or personalities. Buckingham in the
Research done
on the difference in male (between the ages of 9 and 18) and female behaviour
on the Internet found boys were attracted to pictures and games and females to
TV, movie, and soap opera sites and chatrooms (see Cobb, 1996). The ‘National School Boards
Foundation’ found that girls appeared even more likely than boys to use
chatrooms on the Internet: 73 percent of girls and 70 percent of boys use
chatrooms at least once a week, according to their parents (http://www.nsbf.org). See
also WHO: Working to halt online abuse: http://www.haltabuse.org
for statistics of online habits by gender and age, and http://www.clienthelpdesk.com/statistics_research/
for statistics of online viewing by gender and age).
From a survey
by The National School Boards Foundation (2002)
Survey results
suggest that work done in other media reception studies bears out the view that
social activities – such as chat – centred on celebrities or popular media
texts is directed less at simple celebration of such identities and texts, than
at their insertion into the lives and self-formation of participants. In online
inquiry, one way to test this hypothesis, is to examine the text-generating
habits of chat users for elements of expressive-emotional response: possible
markers of a self-aware relation to the meanings being constructed in talk
around celebrity figures, and indicative of their meaningfulness in identity
construction. How rich is the emotional response to celebrity issues as
displayed in the talk around them? How conscious are those talking of their
represented orientation to particular issues – and how can this best be read in
online chat?
Because of the
special repertoire offered to online chatters by the keyboarded symbols called
emoticons, the second research question
I have posed in relation to ‘Britney chat” asks: ‘are emoticons used more
frequently in a youth orientated chatroom than in an ‘adult’ chatroom?’
Emoticons allow users to emotionally “colour” their texted contributions: to
attend to the tone of the talk relation they are constructing with others, or
to affiliate to or distance themselves from particular issues, ideas, postings.
I have compared the use of emoticons and abbreviations in the seven case
studies I have discussed as well with postings from several other chatrooms (see ‘comparison tables” http://se.unisa.edu.au/tables.htm)
to
firstly assess how emoticons add to the signification processing of chat
postings, and secondly to assess whether Britney chat, as oriented to younger
user groups, displays especially rich techniques for identity formation work –
and if so, what these techniques might be, and how might they best be captured
and theorized.
CS 3.1.2 Britney Spears
From
statistics of her album sales and appearances, pre-adolescents make up the bulk
of Britney Spear’s fan base[1]. There are hundreds of fan clubs on the
Internet devoted to Spears, many with
sexual notions of youth attached.[2] I have used this chatroom as an
opportunity to observe whether there are differences in ‘talk’ in what I
believed to be an adolescent chatroom, from language used in what I would
assume to be an adult orientated chatrooms, such as that used in Case Study
One, the emergency ‘storm’, or ‘911 chatroom’ (see Postscript 911),
or a chat on 3D computer modeling discussed in Case Study Six.
CS 3.2 Methodology
For this case
study I have applied three linguistic analytical tools. Firstly, semiotic
analysis or the study of signs, verbal or visual, (Chandler,
2001; Saussure, 1983; Eco, 1979; 1986; 1995; Kristeva 1980; 1984) is
used to search for recurrent meaning-structures or “significations” within
“Britney chat”. In this chatroom I will discuss in particular the chatroom
feature of avatars and usernames, as
well as emoticons, suggesting that each can be used as an identity cue. The
Britney usage is compared to examples of iconic username from two other
chatrooms, both 3-D chatrooms, to test for any distinctive features. Emoticons and abbreviations and the
“identity” sign-tag of the chatter are of course features that are important to
all chatroom discourse (Crystal 2001; Rivera 2002) I am however particularly
interested here in the use of non-word representation, emoticons and
abbreviations, seeking them in particular from a strongly “image-identified”
user site, to optimize the chances of discovering how important visual or
design-representational aspects of chatroom practice might be, as
chat-room-specific communicative behaviour.
Semiotics is thus used as a method to uncover not just how ‘talk’ is
accomplished in a chatroom, but how far chatroom “talk” generally may be said to include a broader than usual
repertoire of representation.
Secondly, I
use pragmatic theory (Ayer, 1968; Peirce, 1980) in an attempt to reveal a
socially embedded reading of chat ‘talk’. Pragmatics[3] looks at the ‘meaning’ of an utterance,
considered as part of a social system, and not just as an example of “talk
performance” – however rich in its construction. Here I use this to focus on
how the various communicative items in chatrooms; emoticons, abbreviations and
misspelled words as well as chat utterance sentence structures (CUSS)[4], are used within a delimited linguistic
or a chat society: to locate both the specifics of this site, and to suggest
that they may be extensible into other, similar, usage-subcultures. And thirdly
I use semantics, (Korzybski, 1954; Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 1990, 1995)
which investigates the ‘meaning’ of a linguistic item, considered as part of a
syntactic system, in terms of how the item, (in this case even an abbreviation
or an emoticon), relates to everything
else within its co-location.
Through this web or matrix of levels of inquiry, I hope to show that
something as seemingly inconsequential as Britney-chat is both richly designed
and enacted, embedded within layers of social significance, from which it draws
comprehensible formations, in turn contributing new formations to such
repertoires, and finally, how it selects and possibly highlights particular
meanings and meaning systems to construct core cultural values for the central
topic focus (Britney) which are potently relevant to this community of
chat-participants.
CS 3.2.2 Transcription
This
multi-layered analysis requires a chat transcription different from those used
so far in this study. For the Britney
Spears chatroom analysis I have divided the “utterances” or chat-turns in ways
promoting a clearer view of individual chat “styles” or the specific
identity-codings of participants. In the following tables in the appendix of
Case Study Three (http://se.unisa.edu.au/a3.html), table one (http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/chat/britchat.htm)
presents the types of phrases used, identified within pragmatic or “function”
categories (i.e. greetings, answers,
etc). This allows for recognition of the range of talk-functions present, and
displays the seriousness of chat which might otherwise be considered trivial.
It also permits the analyst to represent the particular orientation towards
social significance in chat, taken up by individual chatters.
Table Two (see
table one page) denotes the use of abbreviations, emoticon use, and the
beginning of threads of conversation. This allows consideration of the
“colouring” of individual contributions, and so examination of their
orientation to topics as signifying the social or cultural loading of their
talk.
In table three
(see table one page) are the user names of the participants, separated to allow
for careful examination of their usually multi-layered semantic codings, as
significant in identity formation work around the celebrity figure.
Table four (http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/chapter5/table_4.htm) is the raw data: the chat threads as they
occurred in real time, indicative of the degree of chat skill displayed in the
actual experience of talk on such sites, while table five (http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/chapter5/table_5.htm)
lists the utterances used without user name or other coding devices, to examine
the emergent “conversation” as if it alone were the significant feature of
participation (which this analysis inclines to presume it is not). Table six (http://se.unisa.edu.au/3-table6.htm)
contains the 297 words ‘captured’ in
this chat sequence – in one paragraph.
I have done this to discover whether online chat, CMC software coded as
turn-organised, is still meaningful without the speaker-cues provided by its
screened representation. In other words, are those user-specific cues I am
suggesting existing in an “identity-work” chat present to sufficient levels for
an analyst to uncover, without the turn-organised display convention? Is there
any capacity for recognition of user-difference in a chat-sequence such as this
compared to the one that follows with the usernames included:
|
lol loL missed ya too jenn.. while I was
sleepin lmao ter plz stop Go for it baby b!!! I miss? hmm Scott? Lmao...
.?¯S¯?.?°¯Y¯°?.?·D·?. lol lol xoxoxox JuStIn well heather he going to end it
i just know it No Syd damn it meee no not ter lol hmmm mickey But i think hes
gf dont miss him that muc but well see what tomrrow brings |
The
sixty-seven words above are the same as the ones below but without the turns
being separate they do not tell the same story as the sixteen turns that it
took to say this:
|
TABLE FOUR |
|
1. / /\ 1a. <SluGGiE->
lol |
|
2. / /\ 2a. <Mickey_P_IsMine> LoL |
|
3. / /\ 9a. <AnGeL_GlRL> sits n
da couch n holds her head.. missed ya too jenn..while I was sleepin lmao |
|
3. / /\ 3a. <JeRz-BaByGurL> ter
plz stop -OVERLORD walks over to miss <amethyst_desire> and whispers
sweet nothings in her ear |
|
4. C/ /\above4a. <Paul665> Go for
it baby b!!! |
|
5. / /\ 2b. <Mickey_P_IsMine> I
miss? hmm Scott? Lmao... |
|
6. / /\ 5a. <guest-Wild-Just>
.?¯S¯?.?°¯Y¯°?.?·D·?. |
|
7. C/ /\06 6a.
<Pretty_Jennifer>lol |
|
8. C/ /\06 7a. <baby_britney1>
lol |
|
9. C/ /\06 5b. <guest-Wild-Just>
xoxoxox |
|
10. / /\ 2c.
<Mickey_P_IsMine>JuStIn |
|
11. / /\ 8a. <IM_2_MUCH_4U> well
heather he going to end it i just know it |
|
12. / /\ 6b. <Pretty_Jennifer> No
Syd damn it meee |
|
13. / /\ 3b. <JeRz-BaByGurL> no hes not ter |
|
14. / /\ 6c. <Pretty_Jennifer>
lol |
|
15. / /\ 5c. <guest-Wild-Just>
hmmm mickey |
|
16. / /\ 2d. <Mickey_P_IsMine>
But i think hes got a gf so i dont miss him that muc but well see what
tomrrow bringslol |
Without
showing the turns as shown above we do not have the reader-response
mechanism which cues chatters to
continue a communication. We can however,
piece together the story of looking for love, whether several people are
speaking or one. But it does not read as the same story.
Table seven (http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/chapter5/table7_8.htm)
presents all of the words in the Britney Spears chatroom sample, separated into
order of appearance in the chatroom,. This offers the analysis an insight into
word size of “talk” in a chatroom such as this one. There are 3.73 letters per
word on average and it shows that the word formation is very simple and could
be read or written by someone in primary school. But this does not necessarily
class the participants in this particular room in anyway that would identify
educational level. Chatrooms by their rapid flow of text encourages short
simple wording. Table eight (http://se.unisa.edu.au/phd/chapter5/table_8.htm)
presents the same words in alphabetic order, as well as the number of
occurrences for each word and word type. What this table shows is that ‘I’ or
‘I’ is used most often (18 times) with the abbreviation ‘lol’ (‘lots of laughs’
or ‘lots of love’) the second most used expression of the speakers: evidence I
will suggest for the intense levels of identity work under way in this chat,
with self-centred and expressive modes dominant. To provide for some continuity
of categorization and at least some degree of comparative study between case
studies, I have used the same coding as throughout the case studies (see the
Methodology section). The name attribution for each speaker, such as,
<Luvable_gurl15>, is placed in brackets in the tables, and within the
discussion of this case study. The ‘speech’ of each speaker is only in brackets
when in the discussion, not in the table.
CS 3.3 Discussion
Using semiotic analysis, the study of signs both
verbal and visual, as a way to analyze communication in chatrooms allows this
analysis to show how avatars and ikons
can be used to accentuate and intensify the coding in representations of the
chat author. A chatter can have a
textual username, or a picturographic representation of him or herself that has
significance, albeit often only for the time he or she is in a particular
chatroom. In the figure below[5], every time the chatter <Kokuen Lain
Unigama> keys in an example of what I call elsewhere a
Chatroom Utterance Sentence Structure (CUSS) the following image appears, together with the words, <techno teacher Kokuen’s
daughter now leading the good life> below the image. This graphic tag takes
precedence over any CUSS made by
<Unigama>, and must be seen to be colouring the verbal contributions.
Avatar
This person, <Kokuen
Lain Unigama> is identifying her or himself as one who can teach others
technology and this person has chosen the female gender, as Kokuen’s daughter,
to chat through. With this ikon others in the chatroom may feel comfortable
with asking questions in regards to technology. And saying «now leading the
good life» would colour whatever <Kokuen
Lain Unigama> says.
The dialogue
attached to this posting, which I have transcribed but could not directly save
because chatrooms in java script cannot be copied to a word program, is simply
about the chatter <Xian-Shin> speaking to another person who wants to
telephone his or her mother. <Xian-Shin> answers the other person
<Unigama>, with,
This
illustrates how an icon dominates what is actually quite trivial and mundane
information exchange – actually “phatic” or empty conversation to a viewer not
familiar with the characters involved. While the exchange has pragmatic
significance to the speakers, it offers little to other chatroom
“reader-writers”. The ikon however continues to signify, radiating a personalized
and socially contextualised set of messages and values, even into inappropriate
contexts. Like the linguistic device of “over-lexicalisation”: the
agglomeration of too many lexical items around an utterance, said by analysts
to represent moments of cultural nervousness and tension – a sort of
over-compensation – this ever-present “personalization” image and in-group
indicator is perhaps deployed to alleviate the user’s sense of CMC alienation.
As the user posts from her family-oriented security out to the unknown zones of
IRC, her identity is over-expressed; her affiliations permanently fixed or “laminated”, in Barthes’ (1972) term, onto
her utterances. It is as if this user were saying “I am this person, with these
affiliations – don’t you forget it.” This use of avatars and icons is thus
qualitatively different from a chatroom that uses only usernames, such as the
chatroom logs I used in this case study. While intense and rich in
signification, it can be seen to limit flexibility: to restrict experimentation
or fluidity in identity work. It is significant that there were in fact no avatars or
icons used with user names in the Britney Spears chatroom whilst I was
present. In this case study however, the user-name signs, the clearest textual
representatives of the self, are instead textual variations of name, such as
<IM_2_MUCH_4U>, <Luvable_gurl15>, <SluGGiE->,
<Mickey_P_IsMine>, <JeRz-BaByGurL>, <Paul665>,
<guest-Wild-cust>, and <Pretty_Jennifer>. Britney chatters thus
achieve some consistency with the ikon-id, by using enhanced “punning” and
linguistic ambivalence in their name-tags, not necessarily to hide their
identity, but each to emphasize his or herself at a particular time, and
especially within the “sexy-good times” subcultural frame of Britney Spears.
Rather than the “strong” self-assertion of the graphic-tag discussed above,
unchanging in its signification, the Britney tags are “other” oriented:
identity markers arrayed as display, offering selves for social-relational
exchange in a – mostly – sexualized frame: “luvable”, “pretty”, “2 much”. The
absence of graphics is here compensated by intensive textual wordplay – a mode
I suggest that enhances both the feminisation of the site – at least insofar as
it endorses research mentioned above which shows the graphic online mode as
male oriented, the textual as female – as well as inviting a labile, shifting
identity work. Since reader-writers on the site are immediately challenged to
solve the riddle in each name tag, and since “real” identity is mostly
disguised, but in overt ways, the tags alone display the tendency on the site
for identity experimentation and social (sexual?) relational invitations. How
then can we work to uncover and describe the meanings within this playfulness?
When texted language annexes these semi-graphic modes of missed characters and
punning play across capitalization or punctuation codes, can linguistic
analysis alone summarise the processes in play?
CS 3.3.1 Semiotics[6]
The
importance of beginning with semiotics or a study of signs in this case study
relates to the need for a focus on how users can be shown to be acquiring and
passing on meaning within the intertextuality of chatroom ‘talk’, establishing signification in a text-based-chat,
through a marked creativity in their use of both keyboarded character
sequences, and cut-and-paste graphics assemblies. Chatroom dialogue is, we must
remember, neither quite oral
nor written. Because of its screened interface: its limitation – in current
modes at least – to text and supportive image, at core it is semiotic (Shank, 1993). That is, it shows
clear and increasing evidence of breaking away from traditional print-based
forms of text composition, to build intensified representational and signifying
techniques, perhaps initially to compensate its keyboarding limitations, but
more recently within a growing online community “literacy” of consensual forms
and repertoires.
In part this drive to create new and distinctive communicative forms arises from the distinctive circumstances of IRC “threading”, as postings arrive haphazardly onto the computer screen’s dialogue box. It is neither necessary nor indeed possible to take turns as in oral communication, so that the regulatory features of oral conversation cannot apply. The many voices can be "heard" in parallel, making chat dialogue a multilogue discussion (Høivik, 1995), with each “voice” fighting for attention. To have significance, there needs to be an intensified aspect to the signifier, or the material element of the sign. It must be made not only to stand out on its own terms, but to be distinctive and recognizable within the random threads. For most chatters, the default codes: “Janet3”; “John45”, which tag a real world name – most likely their own – to the incidence of appearance of that name in the chatroom – are insufficient as “identifiers”. In most chatrooms, given the reduction of the physical “presence” of face-to-face real-life (rl) talk, and its further limitation in the chatroom dialogue box to relatively short text-utterances, there has been a strong compensatory move to creative “signing” through graphic and extra-semantic modes. Still limited at the dialogue-box level at least, to an alphabetic repertoire, supported only by the grammatical and punctuation signs of the qwerty keyboard, this newly evolved form of communication has produced a compound new repertoire comprising the emoticons, acronymic abbreviations, conventions on “expressive” representation – such as capitals shouting; punning or ambiguous lexical selection, and especially abbreviated “cut’n’mix” forms combining many of the above. All of these are used - often in combination - as personal identifiers. This last multi-form, appropriating elements from multiple sources and imbricating them into a new fusion, is interestingly close to the ideographic mode of Chinese writing, in which one element of a written word addresses its semantic or conceptual load and another its phonetic connections to similar-sounding words (Hegal, 1993; Hu, 1996). The “reader” of Chinese must thus always read on multiple levels for every ideograph, relating it out to both its cultural origins and to its everyday use, to locate its meaning (Rosenthal, 2000). At the same time, the name-terms of chat spaces are also close to the graphically-oriented “tags” of graffiti artists, whose stylized name or initials both teasingly conceal identity, and claim status by their positioning in public places, their over-drawing of other tags, and not least the artistry of their calligraphy (Neuage, 1995). Both cases give some sense of the multi-functioning and multiple cultural engagement of chat-names – and perhaps even of the origins of their IRC use, given both the counter-culture connections of IRC within youth communities generally, and the recent influences of Asian cultures within CMC developments.
Semiotic
analysis, by eliminating distinctions between text and image as signifying
systems, enables this study to move
beyond a strictly linguistic base, into examination of the graphical and
expressive modes used to compensate, and maybe beyond that, to create meaning
in new ways, within the new “conversational” spaces of the chatroom – and
particularly so in a chatroom of saturating expressiveness within identity
work, as is the case with Britney chat. But to fully explore this drive to
identity performance and exploration, such that it extends the actual
communicative range of the “language” or coding system used, it is first
necessary to examine which semiotically signifying communicative functions are
actually in use in the Britney Spears chatroom, and to reveal which are
dominant and recurrent.
CS
3.3.1.1 Emoticons
Emoticons in chatrooms are similar
to manuscripts for theatrical plays, which use use bracketed text (Høivik,
1995) to describe actions accompanying dialogue, or to indicate when
an actor should enact certain feelings
within a speech. In most chatrooms, keyboard
letter combinations will produce an emoticon. The grid below shows that when :)
is typed on a keyboard, what appears in a chatroom, as well as in a Microsoft
Word document, is the graphic J.
This shows that the these particular emoticons, known as “smileys”, are
so well established that they are now automatically made when keys are pressed.
Some chatrooms even colour in the emoticons, to add expressive coding. Three examples are given below;
|
Characters typed
on keyboard |
What appears in
Microsoft Word (2000+) |
What appears in
some chatrooms |
|
:) |
J |
|
|
:(
or :-( |
L |
|
|
:| or :-| |
K |
|
Emoticons
Just as in person-to-person conversation
offline (p2p-off), different dialects and accents develop in different
text-based chatrooms in CyberSpace. For example, emoticons are sometimes
replaced by asterixed gestures, such as *s* and *smile* or *g* and *grin* for the traditional :). For many expert typists the conventions of
character entry make the typed version
quicker than two keystrokes and the unconventional punctuation-sign
combination taken to produce :).
In recognition of
the widespread use of graphic-textual combinations, many chatrooms now have emoticons included with their software.
For example, The Odigo Messenger, Instant Messenger has graphic icons to allow
participants to show other users how they are feeling. A list of the emoticons that can be sent includes those below:
Of the seven case studies collected for this data corpus I have found the highest incidence of abbreviations (30%) and emoticons (6%) in the Britney Spears chatroom (see http://se.unisa.edu.au/tables.htm for a statistical comparison of the seven chatrooms). The dominance of abbreviation use on this site suggests an especially tight community focus: a consensus not merely of style, pressuring all participants to adapt similar forms, but of familiarity and so frequency of concourse. These are complex, multi-layered linguistic constructs. While they are continuous with those used elsewhere in IRC, and more recently on SMS texting on mobile phones, and while these forms also show influences from the semiotic packing used in advertising logos and slogans (see for instance Williamson, 1978, and Wernick, 1991) their heavy use on the Britney site contains particular elements affiliating individual chat participants to Britney culture. A teenage girl will see hunting boyfriends and beautifying as a norm, it is argued indeed that these are transcribed as their sole purposes in life (Davies, 2001). As these lines below show, the particpants in the Britney Spears chatroom are concerned with relationships.
|
11. <IM_2_MUCH_4U> well heather he going to
end it i just know it |
|
16. <Mickey_P_IsMine> But i think hes got a gf
so i dont miss him that muc but well see what tomrrow bringslol |
|
26. <MADDY_CICCONE>Sis i want Justin to get
here! |
|
29. <Mickey_P_IsMine> wel I duno Mickey lol I
juss think hes hottie so i cant really miss him |
|
32. <Luvable_gurl15> i am going to cry if i
dont see my baby soon |
The assumed age
group in this chatroom places this group within the youth market: a demographic focused on identity formation,
marked by heavy levels of over-lexicalised self-expressiveness. At the same
time, the energetic communicative ethos drives a primary push for shortened messages, as well as for
“in-group/out-group” affiliative techniques.
Abbreviations and emoticons intensify the group codes at the pace
required of a group which sees itself as dynamic, mobile and trend-leading (Wrolstad,
2002; Ocock,
2002). The table below reveals the affiliative urge of such youth groups,
attracted to each new generation of communicative technologies, maintaining
fashion-status and social cohesiveness in the one focus.
|
High
Interest in Applications of 3G |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|
Total |
22% |
26% |
25% |
|
Under
25 |
37% |
30% |
45% |
|
25
to 34 |
27% |
26% |
26% |
|
35
to 49 |
19% |
25% |
27% |
|
50
and over |
9% |
24% |
10% |
|
("High Interest"
based upon a six-point interest scale, where ratings of 5 and 6 indicate high
interest.) |
|||
Youth Market percentage of 3G http://www.cellular.co.za/news_2002/060102-3g-market-research.htm
Read
purely as signifiers at the level of communicative technique, abbreviations
thus carry with them a semiotic loading which endorses membership of such
trend-seeking/trend setting youth culture groups. This is, in Barthes’ terms
(1972), a “second order” signification, to be read not as the specifics of the
Britney style-culture claims seen in actual indent tags, above, but as the more
generalized “myth” construction which constructs around IRC and SMS an entire
culture of newness, group-exclusivity, and urgent self-expressiveness.
Alongside
the abbreviation mode, and indeed often compounded into it, is the emoticon –
whether individually keyboarded or software-encoded. Many web analysts have
considered the emoticon to be a “symbolic” form of communication (Herring,
2002; Roberts-Young, 1998; Reid, 1991), presumably in recognition of its
distinctly graphic or visual form, as opposed to textual-alphabetic codes. But
strictly defined, a symbol is a sign that has a non-arbitrary relationship to
what it means. Its meaning is established within a particular cultural
consensus, even if any logical origins
for the connection between the representation and the represented (in semiotic
terms, the “signifier” and the ‘signified”), may be lost in history.
To
use an emoticon, however, is to assign
a meaning, usually to a feeling, through one or more existing keyboard
characters. Emoticons may be “conventional”, in the sense of being available
and consensually established within a given community of users – up to and
including all web users, even across language groups (Churchill and Bly, 2000;
North, 1994) – but they can also be “improvised” or created new, by the act of
creative recombination or re-application to new circumstances. The keyboard
thus becomes a way of adding expressiveness to the words typed into the
dialogue box, restoring some elements of the expressiveness of vocalisation,
facial expression, body gesture, or even handwriting fluency or emphasis, lost
in the standardization of keyboarding and the remoteness and physical
distantiation of the chat relation.
Because
of the conscious choices from the available repertoire of expressively
recombinant keystrokes that the emoticon culture offers, all presentational
selections in dialogue box text entry become “significant” in semiotic terms:
laden with potential expressive meaning, beyond that of the semantic load of
the words themselves. Nor is this semiotic “loading” always an extension or intensification
of the semantic intention. Such elements as case selection, word-“fracturing”,
deliberate mis-spelling, can act alone or in combination with emoticon
elements, to create inversions, ironic effects, deliberate ambiguities, and
entire sets of witty effects, calculated in their own right to influence their
reader(s) – interlocutor(s). In other words, even the presentational elements
of chat are pragmatically and semantically “significant” – although it takes a
semiotic analysis to unearth the techniques in play: to tease out what is being
“signified” by this, or that, selection or creation.
It has for
instance long been established in chat communities of all kinds that using
capitals for every turn taking is considered "rude" – the equivalent
of shouting (Reid, 1991; Rheingold, 1991, 1994). When an otherwise apparently experienced chatroom
participant uses this form of ‘speech’ it is worth seeking an explanation. In
the Britney extract below, at turns 50, 53 and 57 <Luvable_gurl15> uses
capitals - but there is no immediate indication as to why. She (or he) has only four contributions in
this chat sequence: the first in lower
case with the following three in capitals.
|
50. <Luvable_gurl15> HEY PAUL IT IS ME
HANNAH |
|
53.
<Luvable_gurl15> NAD I WILL.....LMAO |
|
57.
<Luvable_gurl15> WAAAAA |
<Luvable_gurl15>
is the only contributor in this ‘captured’ chat sequence to use capitals. This
suggests that <Luvable_gurl15> does not see herself as part of the
general discourse format of the chatroom, but has taken it upon herself to
claim a stronger presence in
this room, than that signified by the
conventional smaller letters. Remember
that in Case Study Two, examining an Instant Messenger room, one person
had used capitals in all of his turn
takings. That contributor always uses
capitals in all his online writing, whether in a usergroup or in a chatroom or
in e-mail, because he professes to be a spiritual guru, and claims it as a sign
of spiritual authority to use capitals (perhaps a reflection of the formal
grammatical convention of the capitalisation of terms for God; Our Lord, the
Saviour, etc). Without similar access to knowledge of the motivations of
<Luvable_gurl15> it is difficult to argue a similar case, or to propose that
the person uses capitals in this chatroom because of her sense of
self-importance. It is however possible to analyse the functions of each
contribution, and to reconstruct the communicative intentions of the
lexical-semantic as well as semiotic-expressive selections the participant has
made. In this example it appears for instance that in turn 50 the use of upper
case is equivalent to shouting across a crowded room to get someone’s
attention. <Luvable_gurl15> says <HEY PAUL IT IS ME HANNAH>. Her naming
of her addressee, Paul; her indication of a past relationship which will lead
him to recognize her without identification (“it’s me”), her addition of her
own name (“Hannah”) and even her informal and colloquial demand for attention
(“hey!”) all operate to mark her contribution out as having been made by a
special participant. The capitalisation thus, in this case, operates as an
intensifier.
In a chatroom
everyone is in the same room, operating in a mixed-conversational medium, in
which individual contributions – especially from those just joining an existing
set of threads - can easily be overlooked.
The conversation is no different in this respect from how it would be if the participants were in a
physical room together, in which noise levels were high. The graphic equivalent
of shouting becomes a necessary strategy – and one underpinned by all of the
other elements of the speech behaviour in <Luvable-gurl15>’s
contribution.
She subsequently, at line 53, displays a
fluent use of chatroom ellipsis: <NAD I WILL.....LMAO> (“laughing my ass off”), building her turns with
complex acronyms. At line 57 she creates a paralinguistic expressive utterance:
<WAAAAA> in response to not being recognized by her friend. Despite the
seeming lapse into juvenile expressions of temperament, this displays her as an experienced, even
advanced chatter, asserting her sense of a superior right to expression and
response in a crowded chat space. But it is the dual signification she adopts:
the representational load of her words and of her keyboarding, which produces
her as this extra-assertive, extra-competent contributor.
This suggests
that language within the chatroom is already establishing a set of behaviours
and techniques distinctively different
from conventional talk, at least in their capacity to add further levels of
communicative “signification” through the keyboard’s graphic-expressive
potential. Can this be adequately explained, within the existing conventions of
semiotic theory? It is interesting to
attempt to represent the practices of a chatroom modeled on the American
philosopher Charles S. Pierce’s semiotic triangle, which consists of sign,
concept and object as shown below.
Pierce was
attempting to capture a meaning
relation between physical or embodied experience, and the symbolic equivalent
in language or in conventions of graphic signage, by showing how the material
object encountered by the physical senses, and its symbolic coding within
thought, are reunited in the use of the SIGN, whether as word or as image. His
efforts are salient as we struggle to explain
meaning-making practices behind those words or images used on websites,
our newest forms of distantiated or alienated communication. But what the
chatroom experience has added, evolved from a very rapid layering of countless
numbers of user contributions and creations and recognitions of
“meaningfulness” or “signifiance”, (the potential to signify) is the desire to
render within this electronic equivalent of everyday interpersonal chat the
immediate and creative expressiveness of actual speech.
In a chatroom the
sign has duel significance. The emoticon and its associated expressive
techniques (for instance abbreviations or avatars) are dually-significant, as
they double the semiotic load of the chat, which now carries a semantic and an intentional-expressive
load. Even at the simple level of the username or graphic identity symbol, the
selections carry multiple messages. Is <Pretty_Jennifer> pretty? Is
<AnGeL_GlRL> a girl? Is <Luvable_gurl15> really 15? No matter. They wish to represent themselves as this
‘other’. No surprise then that the keyboarding of subsequent chat turns is
enriched by the use of expressive forms such as the emoticon, which represents
a shortcut of expressed intent. Emoticons are useful in chatroom discourse because of the hurriedness of chat
‘speech’: the sheer text-entry-pace required to maintain a seemingly natural
conversational exchange, without losing the complex interplays of spontaneous
word projection and response. It is much quicker to relay feelings with one or
two presses[7] of the keyboard than it is to
explain whether one is sad or happy.
The use of username and avatars or icons as symbols of the chatter
provides similar sorts of double signification, hinting to other chatters at
the interpretive and relational positions to be taken up in interactions with
the speaker.
CS 3.3.1.2 3D virtual chats
and icons
Unexpectedly, there were no avatars used in the Case Study with Britney Spears
– a surprising discovery in a chatspace dedicated to a media ikon popular as
much for her youthful appearance as for her musical talent (indeed, some would
argue, more). While avatars and
graphic representations of self or ikons are primarily used for role-playing
sites such as MUDs and MOOs and Habitats,
many chatrooms also let the ‘speaker’ signify themselves through the use
of an avatar. In 3D or virtual chats[8], avatars (author as
sign/symbol) are added to usernames, to
provide the individual signature of the chatter. The screen shot below shows a
virtual chatroom using avatars.
Many newer
chatrooms (those designed after 2001) do not use text. Instead the chatter
speaks into a microphone to create dialogue, instead of writing text onto the
screen. However, even there the author/speaker’s indentifier coding is
an important factor within the ensuing conversation. The selection of the
iconic representation of who chat participants
“are”, sometimes changing at any specific moment, influences the
response relation within the conversational exchanges, in the same ways as in
the text-talk discussed above. There is
a deliberate and purposive link between the avatar and the intended “reading”
(or audio reception) of the conversation. If voice is now present, full
physical cues are not. Some compensation still appears to be necessary.
A feature of
person-to-person offline (p2p-off) conversational analysis that makes it different from person-to-person online
(p2p-on) analysis is that the people who appear in p2p-on conversation are not
necessarily the same as their physical originators. Whether it is through the
username: <Pretty_Jennifer>, or an avatar, identity is disguised. In the
Britney Spears Chatroom users’ gender can only be guessed at. Of fifteen users names in the data
sample, seven are possibly female, one
is possibly male and seven are possibly either:
|
Possible male |
Possible female |
Either |
|
Paul665 |
JeRz-BaByGurL |
Mickey_P_IsMine |
|
|
Pretty_Jennifer |
guest-Wild-cust |
|
|
baby_britney1 |
IM_2_MUCH_4U |
|
|
AnGeL_GlRL |
msbbyblu12 |
|
|
MADDY_CICCONE |
Joypeters |
|
|
Luvable_gurl15 |
TYTAN-guest |
|
|
guest-hotgirlz |
buttercup20031 |
Three-dimensional
chat with iconic (avatar) representation characterizes what the chatter
identifies with and in turn, wishes or hopes others will see him or her as. An
icon or picture of a female warrior, with a username of <lady-warrior>,
may belong to an elderly male, but others in the chatroom, and maybe the author
of the utterances, may believe that the author is a young woman. How we are
affected by these pictures determines how we interpret the utterances and how
we respond – but these interpretations are culturally – and subculturally –
located. Users predict the reception
outcomes of their choices, and work strategically to evoke preferred responses.
Figure 4 CS 3:1 3D Virtual Chat screen http://www.cybertown.com/
For example,
below several representative graphics of ‘the author’ in chatrooms show the
liberty some chatters take in identifying themselves.
|
|
|
|
Just as in the
Britney chat above, where the possible reference to a popular movie text
“coloured” the talk relation, here it is clearly possible to see media
identifications used to convey or annex preferred “identity” to garner
hoped-for responses.
To communicate
such identity claims to others the chatter needs to do little to create a
complicated virtual utterance. In the chatroom screen shown below, in the
dropdown box on the left the chatter can choose an expression to modify what he
or she is saying. Coupled with an emoticon such as a smiley face only a couple
of words need be entered into the chat. Once again, the semiotic layer of such
communication intensifies the semantic and pragmatic, allowing it to abbreviate
to meet the entry-speed demands of the chat format. Many sites even let the
user choose from a list of avatars, speeding up the image-selection process as
well – and also incidentally
accentuating the already observable tendency to identify through
affiliation with widely known and popular media identities. But the self-made avatar gives originality
to the user, adding to the sorts of creativity and expressiveness detected
above, in compound abbreviations and text-punctuation-emoticon clusters.
The avatar or
icon appears before the text whenever the person ‘speaks’ in written text, for
example;
...||Xian-Shin||...
Xian-Shin
Icon avatar
As a result it
pre-colours the posting, both threading the postings for coherent interactive
sequencing, and contributing to the responses each participant aims to evoke
from others – and often selected and preferred others, to whom a posting may be
individually addressed, even in the midst of the multilogue. Recognising this
makes it possible to appreciate the split focus chat participants are enacting.
Not only are they conveying rich layers of identity presentation in their
postings, whether through texted styling or avatar or both, but they are also
positioning their postings to respond to and in turn evoke responses from
interlocutors. It is at this point that the semiotic focus of analysis shifts,
to consider both what, and how, chat is calculating not its representations,
but its responses. And this demands a move back into linguistic analysis:
specifically, into pragmatics.
CS 3.3.2 Pragmatics
Pragmatics
looks at what the ‘speakers’ or writers are doing conversationally in a
chatroom. At this point, a pragmatic
study of chatrooms can show which features of keyboard
character-manipulation (emoticons,
letters, numbers) are being used to “switch” dialogue by double-loading its
semiotic values, to position reception
of the semantic load or subject matter the user is dealing with.
Pragmatics is the
study of actual language use in specific situations. By looking at the factors
that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our
choices on others (Levinson, 1983; Nofsinger, 1991) we can calculate the
speaker’s intentions from the utterances they produce. In studying chatroom
practice, such consideration of the intended outcomes within reception of
utterances must therefore include description and analysis of this double
semiotic load: the semi-graphical components of the keyboarding, which
similarly “position” addressees to “take up” and respond to utterances in
certain preferred ways.
Here I have
represented the chat turns as they might appear in ordinary talk: that is,
without the source attributions which appear on the scrolling chatroom dialogue
box. This is of course how the “speaker” enters them – so it is a means of capturing
the “response” mode of interactive chat as its intentions are coded in – even
if each addressee does have the advantage of receiving the contribution in a
name attributed format (along with all of the non-addressees receiving the
contribution in the mixed sequence scrolling in the open dialogue box). The
removal of the name identifiers does however achieve the function of “remixing”
the chat into physical talk-conventional turns, so indicating how far the
respondent role (reader rather than writer) is crucial for continuity and
reciprocity in this chat mode. Without the named attribution, the talk flows
become incomprehensible and unmanageable.
|
WAAAAA |
|
Ok.. its cool. now your turn
=p |
|
gurl 15 hannah?? |
|
asl? |
|
not cool jenn...criez |
|
huh |
|
kev are you there |
|
which i duno how im failin
science |
|
What? |
By consulting
the table with the user names included, it becomes possible to see the response
interactions – and so to see them as meaningful. These speech exchanges are
heavily invested with the types of additional semiotic loading outlined
above, because, unpinned from the direct exchange-cues of real life
conversation, their semantic load alone conveys too little for us to
reconstruct logical response-pairings, and so find the “threads” of
conversation. While for instance the single interrogative <what?> could
well be a response to the line above – a comment which cannot logically be made
to engage any of the prior utterances; that <what> proves to be a response
to the comment <not cool jenn…criez>, and thus becomes not a shocked
exclamation (“What!”) but instead a semi-denial response inviting elaboration
of an accusation: (“What are you (unfairly?) accusing me of?”)
While
pragmatics can help us to reconstruct responses from the positioning work of
their original proposition utterances, it can also help us to find if users are
switching codes, or shifting the positioning elements of their utterances,
according to the interactive and reactive development of their speech relation.
Code-switching introduces socio-cultural information in context, which is
retrievable through conversational inference (Gumperz 1982; Alvarez-Cáccamo
1990). As can be seen in the conversation below the dialogue is dependant on
knowing what the other participants are saying.
|
57.
<Luvable_gurl15> WAAAAA |
|
58.
<Pretty_Jennifer>Ok.. its cool. now your turn =p |
|
59. <Paul665>gurl 15
hannah?? |
|
60. <Pretty_Jennifer>
asl? |
|
61. <AnGeL_GlRL> not
cool jenn...criez |
|
62. <Paul665>huh |
|
63. <buttercup20031> kev
are you there |
|
64. <Mickey_P_IsMine>
which i duno how im failin science |
|
65. <Pretty_Jennifer>
What? |
The above
table includes nine turns from seven different ‘usernames’. Unlike person-to-person
talk offline (p2p-off) where the direction of the conversation can be followed
by seeing who is speaking to whom, in person-to-person online dialogue (p2p-on)
it is difficult to establish streams of interactivity. The features of p2p chat online create a new
set of rules for interactivity. The degree to which participants spend
time “housekeeping” their engagement with a particular respondent is clear from
this 9-turn extract, where Paul (lines 59 and 62) tries to establish whether
Luvable-gurl 15 (line 57) really is the “Hannah” she claims to be – a surprised
questioning achieved with the double question mark and the paralinguistic
“huh”, rather than in clearly established semantic loadings.
Meanwhile
<Pretty Jennifer> at lines 58, 60 and 65 tries to establish contact with
an unidentified “newby”; someone of whom she asks the very basic information
which operates in chatrooms as “so tell us all about yourself”: <asl>, or
“age-sex-location please…” Presumably in line 58 she is reassuring this new
contributor that she can go ahead: “OK…it’s cool”, advising her on what to do
next: “now your turn…” But to get to this reconstruction of an exchange and so
establish its relational and intentional load (helpfulness and reciprocity) and
positioning of an expected response, we
have had to make a decision about a quite complex “code switch”, where
<Pretty_Jennifer> has moved into helpful instructional modality (<now
your turn…”>), and into very basic keyboard acronym coding (<asl>) and
away from the presumably less patient forms which have produced
<AnGel-GIRL>’s comment at turn 61: <not cool jenn…criez>. Here the
reproof, plus the familiar abbreviation of the name, and the representation of
her own responsive feeling – along with its youth-culture “z” terminal, builds
a complex mix of socio-moral evaluation in the content, and “mitigated” form in
the address. This contribution thus says something like “Pretty Jennifer we
know each other well enough for me to tell you that what you have just done is unacceptable
– but I still like you enough to call you by your pet diminutive name, use
youth-in-group terms which cement our shared sub-cultural bonding, and enact a
mock-emotional response which I know you will laugh at yet still use as a
warning”. With 21 keystrokes, including the space bar hits, she has achieved
all that. Pragmatic loading must be accompanied by semiotic overload, to carry
these degrees of significance.
William James,
who wrote on the analysis of the structures of the stream of consciousness
accompanying thinking, envisaged pragmatism as “…a method of settling
metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable.” (James 1907).
James’s notion of streams of consciousness linking thought to thought captures
much the same seemingly random and discontinuous flow as chatroom ‘talk’. Chatroom ‘talk’ can appear as random
keyboard character entries, often difficult to follow as purposeful
conversation. In turn six and nine in this chatsite sampling,
<guest-Wild-Just> uses only emoticons or alphabetic symbols to
communicate and in 15 <guest-Wild-Just> adds a single proper noun,
<mickey>. It is not clear who <guest-Wild-Just> is speaking to
within this short ‘capture’ of conversation. It is as if the
reader-listener had walked in on a conversation. What is being said with the
emoticons and alphabetic symbols is not universally known, and indeed no one
responds to it. In turn 9 it would be assumed that the x and the o would signify
hugs and kisses. Because
entrance 9 follows <Pretty_Jennifer> and <baby_britney1> it is
possible that <guest-Wild-Just> is flirting with them. This is an example of how chat flows are
economical because of their capacity to fulfill the relational/reciprocal
“positioning” roles covered in pragmatics, by using the signification processes
of graphical/alphabetic recombinant “expressiveness”.
|
6. <guest-Wild-Just> .?¯S¯?.?°¯Y¯°?.?·D·?. |
|
9. <guest-Wild-Just> xoxoxox |
|
15. <guest-Wild-Just>
hmmm mickey |
Analytical
tools developed in pragmatics have found frequent application in discourse
analysis. Much of Pragmatics grew out of Natural Language Philosophy with the
work of Wittgenstein’s concepts of “meaning as use” and “language games” (Shawver
1996, Still 2001). The chatroom as an arena of
entertainment and its dependence on interactive conversational exchange genres
turns its activity into a sustained and dynamically evolving language game[9]. It is this playfulness and interactive
responsiveness which is producing complex and multi-layered significance within
what otherwise might appear as little more than a seemingly random bantering.
In a chatroom
discussion, finding how meaning is being “read” can only be reconstructed with
any degree of certainty through following individual chatters and how they
respond to an earlier utterance. Right from the start though there is the
problem of the ongoing dialogue and not knowing when it begins or ends. In the
example below <IM_2_MUCH_4U> makes his or her first statement at turn
number 11 of my chat sample:
|
11. <IM_2_MUCH_4U> well
heather he going to end it i just know it |
|
31. <IM_2_MUCH_4U> s dead=( |
|
45. <IM_2_MUCH_4U> brb
going to see if he e-mailed me at yahoo |
In the previous ten turns there is no one
with the name “Heather”, and further more no one else is speaking about a
particular person, to provide any positive identification of this “he” in
question. When <IM_2_MUCH_4U>’s next two postings, 31 and 45, are read there can be meaning
applied. It could be assumed that <IM_2_MUCH_4U> is missing someone, and
at turn 45 is saying he or she is checking e-mail to see if there has been any
correspondence. These three lines between turns 11 and 45 seem to indicate that
<IM_2_MUCH_4U>
is concerned that someone is going to end a relationship with him or her. There is also the possibility, given the presence of this
exchange on a media-celebrity site, that the “Heather” alluded to is being used
to position the exchange within the subculture of girltalk over boyfriends: an
elliptical allusion to the teen flick “The four Heathers” (1989), coding its
address to a confidante so that she can instantly slip into “Heather talk”” and
so post back <s dead:(> as an appropriately “in character” reply. Without these references back into
(subcultural) context the response relation becomes too hard for at least the
outsider to read – and in some cases, even for the insider, as the high levels of
interpretive and relational repair talk in these chat exchanges demonstrate.
Pragmatics
is the study of linguistic communication; of actual language use in specific
situations (Prince 1981; Levinson; Clark 1973) as a cooperative/collaborative
process, so that referring backwards and forwards in talk threads “ties” stray
meanings back into meaningfulness. Pragmatic accounts of “co-reference”, where
different names refer to the same individual, are apparent in this case study.
Instead of writing out <Mickey_P_Is Mine>, <guest-Wild-Just>
addresses the user as <…mickey> just as <Mickey_P_Is Mine> responds
to <Pretty_Jennifer>, <Ok Jenn lol>, perhaps not wanting to add the
‘Pretty’ part of the users name. Once again, pragmatics plus semiotics shows
how a particular communicative ethos is under development. Not only do these
participants interact, threading backwards and forwards across postings, but
they abbreviate tags: they indicate familiarity and group acceptance by
shortening the complex tag names – at the same time “outing” the most ‘real”
elements of the name strategies: “Jen”, “Mickey”, and so on.
The
factors that govern our choice of language are important in social interaction
and in examining the effects of this choice on others (Levinson, 1983;
Nofsinger, 1991). In theory, we can say anything we wish, within our
linguistically regulated repertoire.
However, in practice, we follow a large number of social rules as well
as grammatical rules (many of them just as unconsciously observed) that
constrain the way we speak (Crystal, 1987: p. 120-122). Amongst the areas of
linguistic enquiry, several main areas overlap. Pragmatics and semantics both
take into account such notions as the intentions of the speaker, the effects of
an utterance on listeners, the implications that follow from expressing something
in a certain way, and the knowledge, beliefs, and presuppositions about the
world upon which speakers and listeners rely when they interact. Pragmatics
also overlaps with stylistics and sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, as
well as discourse analysis (see Chapter 4 Case Study Five). Each in its way
foregrounds a particular focus, and it is worth examining what each can offer
to examination of chatroom communication. A pragmatic analysis can capture a
range of seemingly “individual” communicative actions (stylistics), and enable
comment on their social applications (sociolinguistics) – including their role
in identity formation and assertion (psycholinguistics) – as well as
contributing to the socially and politically engaged analysis of discourse
(Fairclough 1995; Singh 1996). In this
case study, where the roles of the chatters are identified by their names, as
shown in table Table 4 CS 3: 1 above,
how they perceive themselves often is illustrated through the name. <
Luvable_gurl15> wants others in the room to believe this is a
fifteen-year-old girl who is luvable. This is her preferred character. Even
if she is he, 55-years-old and hates
the world, what matters is that at this particular time she identifies as 15,
lovable, and a techno-trendy female: not just a girl, but a “gurl”. . Social conventions make all of ‘her’
statements reasonable: from the adolescent excess of <i am going to cry if i
dont see my baby soon> to ‘her’
childlike expression at not seeing the one ‘she’ wants to see in the room: <
WAAAAA>. Like the three icon
representations in Figure 4 CS 3:1, these texted expressions are cues which
reveal real people principally as characters who want others to see them as
they are depicted. Once again, the semiotic overload onto the conversational
pragmatic carries the main message of the posting.
The
distinction between pragmatics and semantics is easier to apply than to
explain. One reason for introducing the pragmatics-semantics distinction in
this chatroom is to show how seemingly confusing it is when a chatter attempts
to convey only linguistic meaning.
Ambiguity, vagueness, non-literalness are not the fault of the online speaker,
but the style in which communication is carried on. The semantic load of words
is not enough, once postings are unthreaded, compressed into the interactive
speeds of online IRC posting, and confined to screened text. While Semantics
provides a complete account of meaning
for a language, recursively specifying the truth conditions
of the sentences of the language, pragmatics provides an account of how
sentences are used in utterances to convey information in context (Kempson 1988
p. 139).
Semantics
deals with the relation of signs to objects which they may or do denote.
Pragmatics concerns the relation of signs to their interpreters (see. C.
Morris. 1971, pp. 35, 43
In the next case study I explore what a 'speech act' is when it is conducted in written: an altogether different coding. Are there performative texted messages in a chatroom?
What are the social acts performed when
participators engage in online chat?