Sociolinguistics and CMC

i thought this might be of interest to the other students on the list - my advisor agreed to do an independent study with me on the sociolinguistics of CMC this semester, the syllabus of which is online for safe keeping.

it's hardly exhaustive, given that i only have a week - two weeks for topics like gender and conversation analysis that really get me going - to cover the readings on each topic, but i'm hell of excited to get through some of these. it's also tailored specifically to those articles i haven't read, but have been meaning to read, or have read once and really want to tackle again.

plans for the final project include a terribly long annotated bibliography to use for dissertationing. squires' cmc bibliography was a huge help in formatting this, btw.

In my online traversals, I recently stumbled upon a few japanee blogs, where I noticed the strangest thing... emoticons in many varieties, many of which I can't even decipher. It turns out that there are thousands of japanese emoticons, leading me to believe it is the richest linguistic sms out there. Even the mobiles (handys) come with many emoticons programmed in: flickr photos of japanese emoticons on a mobile. This is not surprising given that Japanese kids (so-called “oya yubi sedai” or “thumb race”) have led the SMS revolution.

This led me to scour the web in search of an emoti-lexicon:

[1]
[2]
[3]

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I'm sure you can churn up many more thru your own searches. Some of my favorites are:

uh-oh: (._.)
congrats: (^-^)b
what the?: (ò_ô)
shy: (*^_^*)
punch: (>_<)○------(^o^)○
fishing: (*^_^;)_o/━━━━━━>ﾟ)))≫彡 ~ ~ ~
pinch: （ ｀´）===C<*_+ )ギュー

As you can see, they get rather complicated, blending in characters from multiple orthographies with symbolic representations of avatars. What I'm left to wonder is with so many complex emoticons, how often do they lead to miscommunications? Are there SMS dialects within the Japanese SMS/CMC community? Or do I just have my head too deeply into English?

I got an email from Dr. Jannis Androutsopoulos, a professor of Mediated Communication at Hannover University informing us about the september issue of the Jounal of Socio that's focused on CMC :) Below is the index:


Jannis Androutsopoulos
Introduction: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication

Susan C. Herring and John C. Paolillo
Gender and genre variation in weblogs

Marisol del-Teso-Craviotto
Language and sexuality in Spanish and English dating chats

Beat Siebenhaar
Code choice and code-switching in Swiss-German Internet Relay Chat rooms

Helen Kelly-Holmes
Multilingualism and commercial language practices on the Internet

Jannis Androutsopoulos
Multilingualism, diaspora, and the Internet: Codes and identities on German-based diaspora websites

Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Postscript: Computer-mediated communication in sociolinguistics

I LIKES!

so not only can you divorce your spouse via text message, but you can now get fired via text message. these are pretty classic explicit performatives here.

the company defended the txt firing, by the way, by arguing that 'We are a youth business and our staff are all part of the youth culture', which is an interesting enough take on it. i was hoping that employees would also be able to txt out of work or to say that they were coming in late, but one of the articles quickly crushed that thought. i wonder to what extent this is an isolated case / media garnering tactic, and whether these kinds of acts are going to, you know, catch on (i'm sure quite a few people have proposed marriage, equally performative, through SMS, no?).