Sociolinguistics and CMC

i love when companies appropriate cmc-lects in their advertisements-

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nIUcRJX9-o

the positioning of the girl's speech as a second language is also cute.

There is a most interesting post up at Masters of Media about the virtues of online (text-based) communication. It's not a direct comparison of online and F2F, but it's explicitly a "defense" of online ways of interacting. I leave it to your reading enjoyment, 'cause it's finals and I got papers to write.

I will note that the post immediately made me think of the article "Internet and face-to-face communication: Not functional alternatives." (Flaherty, L.M., Pearce, K.J., & Rubin, R.B. (1998), Communication Quarterly 46 (3), 250-268) I don't know why, but this title has always stuck with me as emblematic of CMC research.

Hi all, I am getting ready to design an experiment for a class project (perhaps something bigger, in the future), and I'm just wondering if anyone knows of a body of literature that's experimental in nature related to language and CMC, specifically (para?)linguistic features like punctuation (!?.), eye dialect (hangin'; skillz [ok that maybe doesn't count as eye dialect but you know what I'm saying), or visual representations of verbal cues (soooooooo gooooood). An example of the type of thing I'm looking for would be what Iorio once proposed doing, that's either testing the relationship (or perceived relationship) between written forms and phonetic ones, or the perceptions of speakers based on written linguistic cues.

Any leads are appreciated!

Also, SocioCMC is going to Vancouver (or at least several of us are)! Hooray!