Sociolinguistics and CMC

CFP: From Face to Facebook: performing (im)politeness in social media environments

2009-11-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

Call for papers

From Face to Facebook: performing (im)politeness in social media environments

Panel session at the 5th International Symposium on Politeness, 30 June - 2
July 2010, Basel, Switzerland

Theresa Heyd (University of Pennsylvania),
Cornelius Puschmann (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
http://blog.ynada.com/167

In its earliest days, politeness theory set out to identify “universals in
language use” (Brown and Levinson 1978). Such claims to universality were
later contested, in particular with regard to cultural variation (e.g.
Wierzbicka 1991): norms of appropriateness, concepts of face and other
sociopragmatic aspects are nowadays accepted to be (somewhat)
culture-specific. In the light of such ‘variationist’ tendencies, it may be
asked whether politeness and self-presentation are also medium- and
technology-specific. Are there new politeness paradigms in online
communication, especially in its most recent forms?

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr are
“technologies of the self” (Foucault) where people do things with words in a
very literal sense. Constructing a digital self via video, images and still
most prominently language (”meforming”; Naaman et al. 2009) and negotiating
it in exchanges with other users are central activities in social media
formats. While facework could previously be classified unambiguously in
terms of linguistic and non-linguistic actions, the digitally constructed
self also “acts” via language when symbolically engaging in interpersonal
activities such as liking, poking, friending, following, banning and muting.
These linguistic quasi-actions replace the means which are available offline
to indicate stance and manage impressions and therefore fulfill an important
function. In a larger sense, it appears that the concept of “face” itself
has taken on a new meaning in digital social media that is simultaneously
more encompassing and more important: establishing and negotiating an online
identity has become one of the central activities of Internet users.

We particularly invite contributions on the following issues:
* Constructing and maintaining face in social media
* Performative and metacommunicative acts in social media
* Consequences and implications of online self exposure: identity
management, identity safety, privacy vs. exposure
* Performing face in social media vs. Web 1.0 and pre-digital settings
* The mitigation of face in online/offline interactions.

This panel focuses on the related aspects of self-presentation and symbolic
actions as components of digital face management. We welcome contributions
addressing all forms of online communication; studies regarding more recent
social media are especially welcome. Both theory-building and data-driven
contributions are of interest.

Abstracts (500 words max.) should be submitted by December 1, 2009. Please
feel free to contact the panel organizers for more information:
heyd@ldc.upenn.edu
cornelius.puschmann@uni-duesseldorf.de

References

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1978. Politeness. Some Universals
in Language Usage. Cambridge: CUP.

Foucault, Michel. 1988. “Technologies of the self.” In Luther H. Martin,
Huck Gutman and Patrick Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press. 16–49.

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase and Chi-Hui Lai. 2009. “Is it really about me?
Message content in social awareness streams.” CSCW 2010, February 6–10,
2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. Available at
http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~mor/publications/NaamanCSCW2010.pdf

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1991. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human
Interaction. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Watch ILLS 1: LOL Streaming Online!

2009-05-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

To researchers in linguistics, computer-mediated communication, and
related fields:
This coming weekend, May 29-31, 2009, the Linguistics Student
Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is
proud to present Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 1: Language
Online. Through a partnership with ATLAS Digital Media, we are now
able to offer a live stream of the conference online at
http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/ILLS.

Tune in this weekend to participate in this exciting new conference!
Online participants will have the opportunity to submit questions in
real time for the moderator to convey to the presenters.

Invited presentations:
*Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Kings College London
'Small stories as a paradigm for narrative analysis in online discourse'

*Richard Hallett, Northeastern Illinois University
'From Lithuanian identity construction to English-Chamorro
written codeswitching: Linguistic issues in tourism websites'

*Susan Herring, Indiana University Bloomington
'New directions in CMC research: CMCMC'

*Theresa Heyd, University of Texas-Dallas
'Genre theory meets folk pragmatics: tracking a genre label
through the ages'

*Randall Sadler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
'Strange new worlds: Opportunities and cautions in virtual world research'

Please take a moment to have a look at our full program, available at
our website:
http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/ILLS

Thanks, and hope to see you online (or in person?) next weekend!
For more information, please don't hesitate to contact me:
mgarley2 [at] illinois.edu, or my co-organizer, Benjamin Slade:
bslade - at - illinois.edu.

Matt Garley
Ph.D. Student, Department of Linguistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Shameless self-promotion

2009-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

I have an article in the Journal of Business Communication's recent special issue on Meeting Talk:

"So What Shall We Talk About": Openings and Closings in Chat-Based Virtual Meetings
Kris M. Markman

Using the framework of conversation analysis, the author examinesthe structure of interaction in computer-mediated team meetings,focusing on the openings and closings of the team's four virtualmeetings. The author describes how the medium, quasisynchronouschat (QSC), disrupts the temporal flow of conversation and makesbeginning and ending these informally structured meetings difficult.The author finds that the team, as a result, evolved a two-stageprocess for both opening and closing the meetings, which allowedthem to make consistent use of certain linguistic and conversationaldevices to mark possible transition points for openings andclosings. The author discusses how these virtual meetings compareto face-to-face interactions and some possible implicationsfor the use of QSC for virtual team meetings.
--
Share and enjoy!

Conference Announcement!

2008-08-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone--I wanted to make sure the following was posted here as well as on LINGUIST List:

Please forward as appropriate:

The Linguistics Student Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is proud to announce ILLS 1: LOL (Illinois Language and Linguistics Society 1: Language On-Line), the first in a series of conferences on language and linguistics-related themes. ILLS 1 will be held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the weekend of May 29-May 31, 2009.

ILLS welcomes the submission of general empirical and theoretical papers relevant to the field of linguistics and language sciences. Primary consideration will be given to submissions relevant to the field of computer-mediated communication, which is understood to include the multiple and diverse uses of language on the Internet, as well as similar technological modes of communication such as text messaging.

Current invited speakers: Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King's College London), Ylva Hård af Segerstad (IT University of Göteborg), Susan Herring (Indiana University), John Paolillo (Indiana University), Randall Sadler (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Conference organizers:
Matt Garley (UIUC)
Benjamin Slade (UIUC)

Conference website (deadline, abstract guidelines, etc.)
http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/ILLS/

OMG! Like, IMers totally use 'like'!

2008-02-03T17:19:00.000-08:00

So, a professor sent the department some sort of Discovery report about 'languages bursting forth', and in 'related articles', I noticed this:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/01/22/im-language.html

I'll see if I can find the actual research this story's about, but for the time being, it looks pretty basic (and more or less unsurprising.)
So, who wants their corpus? I know I do!

SALSA

2008-01-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Having browsed the abstract submissions to SALSA this year, I see that we're pretty impoverished wrt sociocmc submissions. Seeing as how I'm chairing it this year, I was hoping that we'd be a little better represented. The deadline has passed, but if you're still interested, shoot me an email (joshiorio [-AT-] mail.utexas.edu) and we can work something out. The conference provides housing, transportation to the venue (and to the parties), and a couple meals... AND it only costs about 30 bucks.

http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/

Leetspeak

2007-12-06T12:20:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

I'm new to this blog, but I wanted to contribute some findings. I wrote a squib about the role of leet in CoPs, in light of David Heineman's paper Gleaning Meaning from Leetspeak that was presented at the 2004 NCA convention in Chicago. If I knew how to upload it, I would as a resource. I don't know how to do that...

First, I was surprised that there are so few articles addressing the use of blogs and the CoPs that work within them. But I was even more surprised that this (Heineman) paper was the only thing close to scholarly research on leetspeak. If you know of anything else, let me know.

Heineman's article was incredibly difficult to find. Why? The title was written in leet. Here's the link to the paper (try finding it without this link first for fun): http://convention.allacademic.com/nca2004/NCA_papers/NCA_2_12968a.PDF

Basically, this article addressed directly how "leetspeak" merits discussion in the field and how it is constantly changing to maintain shifts in particular identities. Just thought I'd share the link to this paper, since it was a real pain to track down...Let me know what you think, and I'd be glad to share my paper with anyone interested.

Leetspeak and the ire of linguists

2007-08-31T08:16:00.000-07:00

[crossposted at PC]

Mark Liberman's already covered it (in fact: hat tip), but there is this WSJ article about leetspeak, focusing on how to pronounce some internet-emergent words/spellings/phrases. Nothing's really surprising, except when I got to this sentence I nearly snarfed my coffee:

The words' growing offline popularity has stoked the ire of linguists, parents and others who denounce them as part of a broader debasement of the English language.

Ack! Mark doesn't mention this (hopefully) misguided attribution. Thankfully someone thought to ask someone who studies the most treasured English language user of all time what Shakespeare would think of all this, and this puts our minds at ease:

Gail Kern Paster, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., has reason to believe that a certain English poet and playwright would cheer the latest linguistic leap. Just as the rise of the printed word and the theater spurred many new expressions during Shakespeare's time, the computer revolution, she notes, has necessitated its own vocabulary -- like "logging in" and "Web site."

"The issue of correctness didn't bother him," says Ms. Paster. "He loved to play with language." As for leet, "He would say, 'Bring it on,' absolutely."

If it's good enough for Shakespeare... The author also mentions some work on leet by Katherine Blashki, a new media studies professor in Australia. I am glad to hear of her work because I hadn't before, but check out how it's discussed:

Her subsequent, semester-long research on the subject found their use of leetspeak stemmed partly from wanting to find faster ways to express themselves online. As with other forms of jargon, it also enhanced a sense of belonging to a community, she says.

"It's ultimately about creating a secret language that can differentiate them from others, like parents," says Ms. Blashki. "That's part of being a teenager."

She presented her work at a conference in Spain and has since written nearly a dozen research papers on the topic. She admits she hasn't received much grant funding for her work. "My peers were aghast," she says.

I am confused about why they were aghast - aren't they media studies people? I think the author is trying to suggest that **even the uber-liberal relativistic academics are freaked out by leet**. And I honestly doubt that's the case - though if it is, it would be something good for me to learn now. I don't know about the media studies field, but in linguistics, people might be aghast at such study just because it's looking at writing and not speaking, and therefore studying something that lots of people still don't see as worthwhile to study. But it's not because they think that leet is awful or annoying or a sign of the downfall of society or language. No no.

omg! yahoo

2007-07-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

omg! wtf?

SocioCMC Wiki!

2007-07-19T10:30:00.001-07:00

Hi all,

I just started a wiki over at wetpaint for my (and your?) purposes: it's here. I have been meaning for forever to update my now-very-outdated CMC Bibliography page, but I think the best way to maintain something like this (and be driven to update it on a somewhat regular basis) is to have a collaborative, easily-editable format, which a wiki (I think, but we'll see) provides.

I am hoping to make it a place where we can maintain not only bibliographies, but links to relevant blogs, the websites of people who are doing relevant work, maybe stuff like book reviews?, and popular press articles and whatnot. Basically I always want to have an aggregate of all of this information but have never been un-lazy enough to make it happen. Maybe with other people's help it will...um...help.

So, if you feel like adding some content, please do so! And suggestions on the way pages are categorized and wahtnot are totally welcome - I just added some content-less pages to get stuff started, but it'll be a work in progress.

2007-07-07T17:36:00.001-07:00

Are my online friends for real?

2007-07-02T13:36:00.001-07:00

Hey, an interesting article about Facebook: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6260210.stm

on lolcatz.

2007-05-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting discussion of language and lolcatz waiting to happen on the linguistic anthropology blog, as reported right on icanhascheezburger, as mentioned on language log.

omg inbd!

2007-04-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

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.

The virtues of chatting

2007-04-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Experimental SocioCMC

2007-04-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

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!

language@internet

2007-01-24T18:52:00.000-08:00

I believe all of you are aware of the online journal 'languae@internet'. I find it quite interesting. I wonder if the link (http://www.languageatinternet.de/) may be added to the 'list of links' on our blog!

By the way, here is an interesting article (http://www.languageatinternet.de/articles/761) that may be of some interest to some of you. I believe we may now safely include text messaging (SMS) as part of CMC if we consider the following definition of CMC- computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined as predominantly text-based human-human interaction mediated by networked computers or mobile telephony (Herring, 2007).

Enron Email Corpus

2007-01-24T06:50:00.000-08:00

I've found a corpus of the enron emails that were made public after the trial. It's a huge download and I haven't successfully actually gotten in there so that i can see the emails, but it IS a corpus :)

link to corpus

Please let me know if yall can actually get access to the emails.

gamer audience design, again

2006-12-13T20:52:00.000-08:00

sony has launched a blog site about their psp system for the holidays, hiring outside help to write it as if it were a real blog in the voice of what i imagine is supposed to be your typical gamer? ideologies galore. examples of assumedly-strategically-placed yet strikingly-random-in-their-placement features:

alphanumeric homophone abbreviations ("hope u like.")
adoption of leet-esque speech features ("pwn it!!1!" "hav3...")
lack of final punctuation in single sentences ("start knitting" "iron on")
multiple punctuation ("too funky fresh???" "pwn it!!1!")
various non-standard orthography ("playa" "srsly")

and the excellent lack of capitalization that abruptly ends (styleshifts?) when sony reveals itself to be the author of the blog. in their own post they even admit that the language of the blog was probably a bit much. more sociocmc talk about language and the gaming industry here.

Publication opportunities

2006-12-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone! It looks like many of the folks who post and comment here are doing interesting language-focused CMC research. Some of you may even be writing papers on CMD as I type this. If you would like to publish your work, allow me to make two suggestions.

1) A book I am co-editing on the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (with Dieter Stein in Germany and Tuija Virtanen in Finland) has lost some contributions and is looking for a couple of good papers that focus on pragmatic issues in online discourse to fill the gaps. If you're working on something that you think might be appropriate and that could be ready by the end of December (this month), contact me with a brief description of your paper, or email a draft version.

2) The online journal language@internet, edited by Dieter Stein (with yours truly on the editorial board) is dedicated to linguistic CMC research, and needs good submissions. It has the advantage of being an open-access journal, which means that people around the world can access it freely and are therefore more likely to read and cite your article. It also has a shorter time from submission to publication than most print journals.

If you're looking for a more traditional (print) journal in which to publish CMD research, the Journal of Pragmatics and the Journal of Sociolinguistics are both receptive, albeit not open access. There is also a brand-new journal, Discourse and Communication, that will be launched in February 2007, that is dedicated to the intersection of linguistic discourse analysis and communications research, and which should be friendly to CMD research (also not open access, unfortunately).

Of course, there is also the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, which publishes on CMC broadly construed, and occasionally publishes language-focused studies. And is open access ... but more competitive to get a paper accepted in (last year's acceptance rate was 15-20% of submissions).

I mention all this because I see a lot of talent in this blog, and a lot of good ideas. They deserve to be published! I know everyone is busy this time of year, but ... I hope you will think about it.

Let's talk play.

2006-12-01T06:06:00.000-08:00

Y'all, I am thinking of putting together a panel submission for AoIR 8.0 in Vancouver (Oct 18-20, 2007). The theme is Let's Play!, and I think this theme in particular lends itself to some good, innovative sociolinguistic work. There's so much that hasn't been touched (or at least published :) with verbal art online, linguistic strategies of play online (um, I would love for someone to do a "Meditations on Emoticons" sort of piece?), humor/irony/sarcasm online, humor as a valued genre particularly in textual talk (like social network sites), virtual flirting, etc etc. This is of course in addition to any work (here is where there HAS been some work) people have on language in gaming or playful *environments*. Maybe it would be nice even to have one meta or methodological paper, like, "What can linguistics tell us about identity/play/interaction/socialization online?" Because people at AoIR, most of whom aren't at all linguists, are usually interested to know how our work can inform theirs.

Anyone game? (so to speak) If yes, I guess we could use this as an organizing/brainstorming platform, though I'd rather do it via email. I will post the CFP below for those who haven't seen it or have forgotten about it. Note that panel submissions require a 500-750 word description of the panel theme, plus 200-word mini-descriptions of each paper (I would expect that 3-5 papers would be ideal), and submission deadline is Feb 1. Also note that if you were planning to submit your own paper, you'd want to think about the value of having it in a panel v. individual submission: if the panel isn't accepted, neither are any of the included individual papers. Soooo it's kind of a group risk-taking thing.

Internet Research 8.0: Let's Play!
International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Workshops: October 17, 2007
AoIR conference: October 18 20, 2007
Deadline for submissions: February 1, 2007

Let's Play

The Internet better, internet/s - is at once part of the background hum of the developed world and an exotic realm of fantasy and play. It is an essential, mundane part of daily life, and simultaneously radical, revolutionary, profane, and fun. Internet/s invite us to play. We surf, blog, role play, and chat in the interest of work, learning, and play. Serious technologies and applications invite playing around as a way to learn how to use them. Playful applications take root in serious business,
as online chat becomes a business communication tool. Games find applications in education, business, and war. Playful blogging evolves into a social and political force to be reckoned with. We play with our identity online, shaping current and future roles offline. The play goes on.

Our conference theme of play invites empirical research and theoretical reflection on how human beings 'seriously play' with one another on, via and through internet/s, on local, regional, and global scales. We call for papers that explore the intersection of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane, the revolutionary and the mundane, and fantasy and
the reality.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and communities, that address the (playful) blurring of
boundaries online. The following TOPICS are suggestions simply intended to spark initial reflection and creativity:

- Mundanity implies normalcy, and thereby, the efforts to understand and regulate online interactions in ways that are analogous to and consistent with offline practices and norms (e.g., privacy protection, norms for community interaction, efforts to regulate information flows involving pornography, hate speech, etc.). As internet/s become interwoven with
ordinary life on multiple levels, in what ways do these alter ordinary life, and/or how do prevailing community and cultural practices reshape and 'tame' such internet/s and the interactions they facilitate?

- Global diffusion: how do internet/s, as they exponentially diffuse throughout the globe facilitate flows of information, capital, labor, immigration and play and what are the implications of these new flows for life offline?

- eLearning: how can such practices as distance learning and serious games utilize the liminal domain (the threshold world of dream and myth, in which important new skills, insights, and abilities are gained in the process of growing up) to go beyond traditional ways of learning? Are they necessarily better, or easier, to use or to learn from?

- Identity, community, and global communications: how will processes of identity play and development continue, and/or change as the role and place of the Internet in peoples lives shift in new ways including the expansion of mobile access to internet/s?

- E-health: what do new developments in sharing medical information online and expanding telemedicine technologies into new domains imply for traditional physician-centered medicine, patient privacy, etc.?

- Digital art: from downloading commercially-offered ringtones to facilitating cross-cultural / cross-disciplinary collaborations in the creation of art, internet/s expand familiar aesthetic experiences and open up new possibilities for aesthetic creativity: how are traditional understandings of aesthetic experience affected and how do new creative /
aesthetic / playful possibilities affect human 'users' of art?

- Games and gaming: the average gamer in North America is now a twenty-something whose lifestyle is more mainstream than adolescent. As games and gamers 'grow up' and as games continue their diffusion into new demographic categories while they simultaneously continue to push the envelopes of Internet and computer technologies what can we discern of new
possibilities for identity play, community building, and so forth?

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference theme, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on that theme. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet beyond the conference theme - e.g., in CSCW and other forms of online
collaboration, distance learning, etc. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference papers, but we also encourage proposals for creative or aesthetic presentations that are distinct from a traditional written 'paper.'

We also welcome proposals for roundtable sessions that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized panel proposals that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme.
- PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- CREATIVE OR AESTHETIC PRESENTATIONS - submit abstract of 500-750 words
- PANELS - submit a 500-750 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
- ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the
roundtable discussion and interaction

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting OR submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.

hello!

2006-11-29T06:49:00.000-08:00

Hi there!
It is a real pleasure to be part of sociocmc blog. Thanks to Lauren for letting me participate in this intellectually exciting blog. By the way, for those who do not have any idea who I am (not that it matters a lot ;)), let me just introuduce myself to them. I am Anupam Das- a doctoral student in Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington with a minor in Information Science. My primary research interests include sociolinguistics and pragmatic approaches to computer-mediated communication, especially computer-mediated discourse analysis and social network analysis. Currently, I am working on my pilot study for my dissertation. I am looking at the the relationship of social closeness of bilingual Bengalis on orkut and codeswitching. This paper examines linguistic variation among bilingual Bengalis on orkut with respect to the hypothesis, based on the model of Milroy and Milroy (1992), that standard variants tend to be associated with weak social network ties, while vernacular variants are associated with strong network ties. In the case of this study, the standard variant is English, and the vernacular variant is Bengali. Specifically, the study examines whether the strength of ties (i.e. weak vs. strong) of users’ social network has any relation to their choice of language in their ‘scrapbook,’ which is a public interface in which orkut members can leave messages, or ‘scraps’, for their friends. The study also examines what Bengalis talk about on orkut (i.e., topic of their scraps) and how interlocutors achieve their communicative goals (i.e. functional aspects of their scraps).

I would appreciate any constructive suggestions/feedback for my research. Does anyone know if there are any studies that looked at social network sites from sociolinguistic point of view?

turn units and emoticons.

2006-11-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

i thought the thread below about turns at talk was interesting enough to make into its own post, so here it is. quoting susan herring:

I appreciate the discussion about emoticons as turn units, by the way. When I teach speech acts in my computer-mediated discourse analysis course, there is always much discussion as to whether an emoticon can function as a proposition (i.e., a speech-act bearing unit). I adopt the view that if the emoticon constitutes the entire message (in chat) or appears on a separate line (in, say, email), it is a proposition, but if it appears on the same line as text, it (usually) inflects a textual proposition. This is theoretically not a very coherent treatment of emoticons, but it reflects my intuitions. Any ideas as to why it should work this way?

comments to follow.

Textspeak the new AAVE?

2006-11-13T06:29:00.000-08:00

OK, maybe not. After spending a wonderful but exhausting weekend at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference, where Raclaw's and my paper was shockingly the ONLY one about CMC (other than using the internet as a source for data), I'm a little too weary still to talk about this:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

Nevermind that I just spent a weekend trying to explain to people why I don't think names like "text-speak" or "netspeak" are very useful, and also that much of the stuff we attribute to "teenagers" is also heavily used by other groups. I'm interested in this last quote. After reading it, I immediately thought (and this is perhaps because AAVE is on my mind because it's SUCH a hot topic at NWAV), "It sounds like the way people used to talk about AAVE." Well, Black English or Ebonics, really; I don't think people who would make this statement would know to call it AAVE. But the similarity: that it's not a "full" language, but that you can somehow discern someone's understanding despite the halfsies language they're using, but the language could potentially get in the way. And that there's a debate about whether it's appropriate for use in contexts where some kind of Standard English is generally expected. And this similarity is not perhaps limited to AAVE, but it's the most well-known and well-studied dialect (here in the States) for a point of reference, with a large population of speakers and lots of debates and controversy surrounding its use.

I don't have much more of a point than that - I gotta go catch up on my schoolwork I didn't do over the weekend. CU!

ps - Our paper went well, but I might talk about it tomorrow or Wednesday instead of today. Y'all understand.

MultiMeDialectTranslation (how do you remember THAT?)

2006-11-01T10:11:00.000-08:00

This is way cool and surprisingly relevant, methinks. Anyone have any involvement with the multimedia translation scene? I'd love to hear more about it.

MultiMeDialecTranslation 2007 - Third International Conference of Dialects and
Multimedia

The conference is directed at academics from various disciplines as well as
translators and students who are interested in the translation of dialects in
multimedia contexts. The conference will concentrate on a complex,
interdisciplinary subject area involving linguistics, communication studies,
film studies and translation studies as well as other areas of cultural studies,
sociology and other disciplines. The main topics to be covered at the conference
include dubbing, subtitling films in dialect and linguistic varieties; theatre
translation; cultural transfer processes in the characteristics of dialects;
archaisms, regionalisms, varieties in the continuum between dialect and standard
language; diglossia (national language and regional or local language;
''official'' and ''non official'' language); the use of new technologies in the
translation of dialect.

speakers 1, punctuation 0

2006-10-31T12:35:00.000-08:00

so i'm looking at this fine post for examples of speaker style for a lecture i'm giving tomorrow and had to point out this tiny, minute detail.

the content of the post is awfully long, and the author makes use of sentence-final punctuation pretty regularly throughout except for the very last sentence. i know that some of us have argued that sentence-final punctuation might be seen as unnecessary (some might say redundant) in one-sentence utterances because of the visible line break declaring the end of the sentence, but it's pretty salient when you see punctuation explicitly missing at that point in an otherwise punctuated piece of discourse.

also, the use of ^ is way cool.

Interpretation?

2006-10-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

I am not sure what to make of this, but I do know that it's interesting. (esp. "the IM language")

Also - does anyone mind if I change the theme on this bad boy?

doppleganger + phonetics = something sinister

2006-10-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

i'm taking a speech play and verbal art class this semester and we've been analyzing sound in a number of ways. and i have to do a paper in there so i've been thinking of ways to do this use tools like praat to analyze something cmcish. i'm planning on doing an analysis connected to my attitude research, so this might be interesting for my doppleganger (and perhaps others with similar interestes to my doppleganger) if he's still mulling around on that sweet sweet formalism.

what effect would the adding of an emoticon to the end of a text have on suprasegmental aspects of the speech. you could compare the presence or absence of different emoticons with different pitch patterns, or rates, or pause structure. at that kind of micro level, would anything be different. if they were different, then this would suggest that we had some tool to quantifiably measure of online discourse structure from a slighty psycholinguistic/experimental perspective. it would also suggest something about the relationship between the off and online.

if they're not different, then... i have a feeling they'll be different :) with lots of data, i'll be some kind of patterns emerge, and with the proper statistical analysis, you could marry the descriptive data from praat with quantitative methods.

chevrolet - teh american revolution

2006-10-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

so i just caught this commercial for chevrolet that featured their new line of gas-conserving cars; said commercial prompted me to visit their website for more info.

the site name? reduce ur use dot com.

i'll admit that i've seen my share of advertisements that use language from straight out the chatroom, but never ones that didn't have an explicit connection to internet, computer, or gamer culture. is the environmental awareness angle that chevrolet's going for somehow being tied to a young, hip attitude that they also see as tied into the internet? and if they were going to dip into the pool of online language, why pick a stigmatized feature like ur to take that stance?

Foley followup

2006-10-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

This was going to be a comment to Joshua's post, but it got too big. But it's still conversant with his post, so you have to read them both. No lazies around here!
....
What I'm confused about is whether there were emails AND IMs, whether people knew about SOME of them before others, and whether that matters at all. I saw the headlines first about email, but then all I heard people talk about was IM. I agree with the not-holding-up-in-trial thing, on account of the text files being editable - actually, on NPR the other day (this story), they had this whole, like, "expose" on IMs, which I thought was kind of interesting, because it framed IMing as being a "new" thing. IM is getting so much press out of this whole thing.

Also I just saw on that NPR page that there's a transcript of an IM convo between a reporter and someone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation about IM privacy. Snippet:

Kramer: What are the privacy implications of using AIM as a medium?
Kramer: Like, who can be watching your conversation?
Eckersley: So, there are a few layers of likelihood.
Eckersley: It will very often be the case that the person you are speaking to is recording the conversation.

Kramer: Is there a way to tell that?
Eckersley: No.
Eckersley: Even if the instant messaging software itself isn't logging the conversation,
Eckersley: the other party can copy and paste the text of the conversation to save a copy

Kramer: Can the instant messaging company save your messages too?
Eckersley: The instant messaging companies,
Eckersley: could save a copy of the conversation if they wished to
Eckersley: AOL claims that they do not do this routinely,
Eckersley: and that is believable
Eckersley: they would be recording an awful lot of uninteresting conversations
Eckersley: What is more likely is that they keep a record of who is talking to whom

This seems really strange, actually: the reason we know that Foley is (pardon my slang here, but I have to) a douchebag is because we have these written records of things he said or did, and someone was able to save them and did - in this case it was the teen being waaaay smarter than the (again) douchebag adult. But then they're using this as an opportunity to scare people about how little privacy they have when using IM, to *warn* them that their messages could be saved without their knowledge? Isn't this very function why we were able to CATCH this guy?

I'm not taking a position here on privacy rights, but you must admit these are some mixed messages. The interview talks about being "safer" online, but...do they want pedophiles to be safer? The "victims" in this case weren't the people whose IMs were being unknowingly saved...I'm confused.

One last thing about this: the piece ends with this explainer: "*For privacy reasons, both of our screen names have been replaced with our real names."

Since when were *real* names more private than screen names!

full of scandal!

2006-10-04T19:59:00.000-07:00

so that whole mark foley sex scandal with the email and the IMs?

whoa.

supposedly abc has 52 separate exchanges between young boys and the ex-congressman, though i've only found a few. i'm a little surprised that the instant message evidence is framed as so condemning by the sites and their commenters, since they're not exactly traceable, right? as far as i know AIM doesn't keep records in the way that an email server might, so i'm assuming these are just rtf files of the conversation the page happened to save. i doubt they could ever hold up in trial, for example.

ob-socio-cmc comment: DON'T THEY TEACH CONGRESSMEN HOW TO USE PUNCTUATION AND ZOMG WHY CAN'T HE CAPITALIZE

Relevant funnies

2006-10-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

Also, this is really entertaining (via Left Behind at the Fishbowl).

for the linguists in the house

2006-10-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

over the next year i'll be conducting a linguistic analysis of a chunk of chatroom or instant message discourse. as per my department's wishes, this analysis will focus much more intensely on the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic aspects than anything particularly sociocultural. we're kind of old school like that.

is anyone familiar with some publications that don't just descriptively list features of online communication, but take a more traditional linguistic approach to the categorization of such features? i know that susanna cumming does similar work, but as far as i know it hasn't been published. i'd like to get a feel for what's been done with this area before setting out on my own.

i should probably mention that, for the record, this is not intended as a solicitation for outside help on this research project.

Send me all your ideological threads

2006-09-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

Dear readers (uh, contributors? do we have any readers who aren't also contributors?),

Does anyone have links on hand from internet discussions about internet language? That is, message board discussions, Slashdot threads, discussions emerging from news articles linked to elsewhere (like MetaFilter, "The Fray" on Slate.com, etc.), LJ posts with followup comments, blogs with extensive comment sections, etc? I have a few in mind, but I know there's a lot of stuff I've come across that I haven't kept the links for. I am mainly looking for stuff that is expressive of the layperson's (or non-layperson, whichever really) opinions (aka ideologies) about CMC-type linguistic forms or practices.

Post away! Thx.

stupid terminology

2006-09-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

So I'm searching for a term that encompasses the following notion. Does it exist?

Herring's "CMC Forms" + non-standard spelling, punctuation, and capitalization

Does "CMC Forms" include these other features of online language, or does it just refer to things like abbreviation, onomatopoeia, emoticons, etc?

Actually, the "new Facebook" debate IS interesting.

2006-09-08T18:49:00.000-07:00

(cross-posted at polyglot conspiracy. Sorry, I'm low on material right now over there!)

I haven't had as much time this week as I'd have preferred to pay attention to the whole Facebook privacy uproar over the new News Feed features (for a summary of some other people's opinions though, and links galore, see the Assn. of Internet Researchers' listserv archives from this week). There's lots of points of interest in this story - like how hundreds of thousands of students allegedly signed an official petition for the revision of the features (which just happened today), demonstrating that yes, today's youth DO get riled up enough to take social action on "issues," but those issues might be utterly devoid of ultimate social significance in most adults' opinions (dare I claim). Or like how social software designers don't often enough take social scientific principles or research into account when creating their sites; if they did, they might have a better feel for what their audience wants. Or like how 30 people yesterday unwittingly discovered that I was currently "raising and lowering my glottis."

But something that's gotten me excited the past couple of days is to learn about the names of all the Facebook groups that people have been coming up with in support or protest of the site change. That is, the main means of mobilization in this argument is through the system itself (an interesting point, as someone on the AoIR list astutely brought up, that the very thing people are protesting against provides them with the means to protest it!) in the formation of new system-internal groups people created and joined. Aside from the rather dully titled main petition group (Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)), the groups have names like

Stop Right There, Facebook!
The New Facebook Sucks Long and Hard
The New Facebook Makes Me a Better Stalker
I HATE THE NEW UPDATE TO FACEBOOK
AAAA! Facebook is Stalking Me!!!
AAAH! Facebook is now more Stalk-tastic than ever!
Death to the "new" Facebook
Fuck Facebook's New Features
Dear Facebook, Please Chill out. (U-M Chapter)
The New FaceLift for FaceBook is slightly Creepy
If you hate the new facebook, say I!
I want old school facebook back!
Actually, I like the Facebook News Feed
Actually, I'd say that i'm rather pleased with the new facebook
Actually...I kinda like the new Facebook.
actually, i kind of like the new facebook.
Actually, I like the "new" facebook
Actually, I LOVE the New Facebook
Actually, I'm cool with the New Facebook
Actually, I'm not that offended by the new Facebook
Actually, I've Grown Accustomed to the New Facebook
Actually the New Facebook Doesn't Really Bother Me
Actually....we kinda like the new facebook
I love me some Facebook News Feed
New Facebook Feeds Makes it Harder for Me to Be a Ninja

OK. It may be obvious that most intriguing to me here are the groups listed in the middle, which all start with "actually." At first I was just loving the fact that these groups were taking on a conversational positioning, such that groups are responding to other groups, in direct dialogue. This fits right in line with the tendency of people to use testimonials, comments, or walls to make conversational threads (Facebook's "wall-to-wall" feature illustrates this beautifully) rather than to leave static, one-time commentary, which is presumably the designated function of the testimonials etc. in the first place. So there's this demonstration that people really want to use these sites for interaction and conversation, whether it's on the directly interpersonal level or the group level, where you in essence let the groups interact for you, without any one person's direct involvement, other than creating the group or joining it. But it's different kind of conversation than I think has been pointed to by most internet research, and I'm not sure we have a clear way to categorize it.

[Note: the names themselves are really conversational too, and it's interesting that "group" isn't any kind of official "group" like we think of. Rather, its creation and dissemination is really a form of conversation. You can see this in the use of the first person pronoun in most of them. Hang on to this; I'll hopefully come back to it someday.]

Then as I was browsing through more groups, I realized that this "actually" only came up when I searched globally through groups. The groups for Michigan's and Virginia's networks (which I'm in) didn't have them. And, the first few on the list up there are from Michigan, while the last two are from Virginia. There's something to be done here on how different regions, campuses, communities use groups as part of their online interaction, and the language they use for it. Is the "I love me some" used more in Charlottesville than Ann Arbor? Are Wolverines more likely to use -tastic productively than Cavaliers? Do Southerners punctuate more than Northerners? I realize that group names are a far, far cry from "everyday" language or writing, and that looking at online systems automatically excludes a whole bunch of people who aren't on them or don't use them much. Still, it seems that if you wanted to get a feel for how folks around a particular campus might talk, slang they might use, and topics that might come up in the dining hall, groups might be a decent place to get primed.

Just for fun, here are some other interesting group names. God love those clever undergrads.

I am In Too Many Fucking Facebook Groups But One More Won't Hurt
I Pretend To Do Facebook Strictly For Satirical Purposes.
Coalition To Stop these Stupid Mutha F*ckas From Makn Stupid ass Facebook Groups's
Actually,i don't have the time to be a facebook whore because i have a LIFE
drunk facebooking is the new drunk dialing

And speaking of conflict, David Crystal has come out with a directly anti-Trussian (I can't even believe I just entered her into the canon of authors who get to have -ian after their names) book (via the Log). Let the new linguistics wars begin? (Of course, Truss is playing grammarian-slash-social critic, so it's not really a war about linguistics, and it's not a war within linguistics at all. It's something more like a standards war, perhaps.)

studying sociocmc

2006-08-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

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.

kaomoji: japanese emoticons

2006-08-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

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?

Journal of Sociolinguistics: CMC Issues

2006-08-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

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:

Journal of Sociolinguistics 10:4
Theme Issue: Sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication
Issue editor: Jannis Androutsopoulos

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!

SMS meets early Austin - you're fired.

2006-08-06T00:48:00.000-07:00

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?).

Destroying the Chinese language(s?); iconic texting

2006-07-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Hong Kong, where I am busy catching up on all the interesting reading my parents have set aside for me from the past year's South China Morning Post. Unfortunately, because SCMP is lame and keeps almost nothing online for free, I have been unable to link to many interesting things for my other blog. For this blog though, there's a story good enough (or at least just relevant enough, to know it exists) that I will take the sweet time to transcribe it for y'all.

You see, apparently English is not the only language threatened by the Web and its emergent linguistic properties. People are concerned about Chinese, too (presumably this article means Putonghua [Mandarin] though it just says "Chinese" throughout). It's fascinating that this is a media issue not just in the US, but the world over. There are also some interesting differences in the alarmism over English v. the alarmism over Chinese, which have to do with the state and status of the languages within their respective societies and the function they are perceived to have in terms of nationhood. "Chinese" (as I have learned through museum visits here) is a very important concept for China. One placard I saw at a museum actually credited written Chinese with the maintenance of China's political unity for the past several centuries. Plus China's political structure is very, uh, different from that in the US, and language - and control of language - is a part of that too.

[As a sidenote - does anyone have any representative media articles about the ruin of English in Britain or Australia or Canada?]

It's also interesting for its discussion of what the Chinese "cyber slang" actually is, and its attribution (by a linguist, yay!) to the desire for speed in online communications. Enjoy!

WAR OF WORDS (June 7, 2006)
China, like the rest of the world, is experiencing a language evolution as Web jargon enters the vernacular. But some purists are not impressed, writes Ma Jie

Initially coined for convenience, internet slang has crept into everyday conversation on the mainland, and not everyone is :) (smiling) about it.

In an article on the internet, writer Zhang Xinxin listed "dismembering and sabotaging the language" as one of its 10 most harmful effects. And author Zhu Jing singled out online slang and so-called Chinglish phrases as threats in his book, The Crisis of the Chinese Language, which was published last year.

This digital divide is aggravated by a generational gulf: 52 per cent of the mainland's 110 million internet users are under the age of 24, according to a survey by China Internet Network Information Centre last year.

The experiences of Yao Zhu, who teaches English at Beijing Railway No 3 High School, illustrates the challenges. At the start of the semester, she received a puzzling note from a student, Lu Mengnan. Written in what Yao describes as "Martian" language, it was a confusing array of symbols, phrases and acronyms.

A regular Web surfer, the 23-year-old teacher is in touch with teen jargon. Even so, it took her a while to decipher the note. "It was amusing, and a lovely gift after I finally figured out the meaning," she says.

The note had been sent as a brainteaser. "It was just for fun," says 16-year-old Mengnan. "Because Miss Yao is young and fashionable, I like to share interesting things with her." And she is proud to be communicating in "Martian."

"It's a language that belongs to a new generation. Everybody my age knows what cyber slang means," she says. "If you don't, you're out."

Mengnan and her classmates' fluency in cyber slang gives them a handy advantage when they pass notes in class. "Even if we're caught, most teachers won't understand what the messages are about. It's like a secret code." But Mengnan says she wouldn't write a similar letter to her Chinese-language teacher. That would be "disrespectful and meaningless."

Mi, the word meaning "fanatic" or "fan," is old hat now. According to a lexicon of online slang by Hui Tiangang, to be published later this year, the trendy word to use is fen si - the English homonym that computer programs translate as "vermicelli" or "glass noodles." The work will update a glossary of 1,300 cyber slang phrases compiled five years ago by linguist Yu Genyuan of the Communications University of China in Beijing.

A student of Yu's, Hui hopes to include more words which have recently crossed over into the everyday conversation of schoolchildren, taxi drivers and television programme anchors - potentially doubling the list compiled by his teacher. They include terms such as hong pei ji (literally, baked chicken), to mean homepage, kong long or dinosaur, to describe an unattractive woman, and quing wa (frog) for an ugly man. However, some expressions such as cai niao, meaning "newbie," have popped up out of nowhere.

Then there are expressions made up of Arabic numerals and English letters, or a combination of the two. Some are relatively easy to decipher: "bf" for boyfriend, "gg" for ge ge or elder brother in Putonghua. Others take a little lateral thinking: "3ks" is "san," plus "ks." Put together, it sounds like "thanks."

Then there are the odd combinations that require some knowledge of Putonghua to work out: "55555," or wuwuwuwuwu, is a long "boohoo" in English, while "9494," or jiusijiusi, means "that's right." Having fun with these expressions is just a bonus. The real reason for all the wordy weirdness is speed, says Zhang Pu, a professor of linguistics at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

To chat in cyberspace, surfers have to move quickly or lose their place. Typing some conventional words on a keyboard can involve too many keystrokes. Surfers soon reject the slowpokes who don't know the shortcuts, especially with broadband access costing a minimum 80 yuan a month. Coining a new word saves time, cash and wins kudos from peers.

Not surprisingly, the trend has drawn flak from some traditionalists. Such innovation is unhealthy for the development of Chinese culture, according to Li Rulong, a professor at Xiamen University in Fujian province. Li, 70, fears teenage slang is contaminating the centuries-old language.

But Yu argues that all people are equal in contributing new words and expressions to the languages. "Since the internet has become an indispensable medium of communication, online jargon is surely not something to be banned and its impact on real-world communication is unavoidable," the linguist says.

That won't stop some authorities from trying. In March, the Shanghai legislature prohibited the use of cyber slang in its media and textbooks, the first ban of its kind on the mainland. Textbooks and media are models for language usage and should not be allowed to adopt "sub-standard" cyber slang, says Wang Yaoxi, a member of the legislative affairs committee of the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress.

Others suggest the flap over proliferating cyber slang is unwarranted. "There's no need to overreact," says Zhang of the Beijing Language and Culture University. "Most youngsters are capable of distinguishing between the appropriate and inappropriate use of internet slang."

Far from being a threat, Zhang says new words help enrich the language with youngsters' creativity and verve.

"Some new words from cyberspace will be gradually accepted by the public and assimilated into everyday language, while others that don't have legs, will fade away," he says. "It takes time, but the language will work out eventually. It's just a necessary stage in the development of modern Chinese."

The anti-slang drive infuriates many young net users. "There's no reason to discriminate against online language," writes Mu Yifei on www.rednet.com.cn.

Mu and other critics ridicule the guardians of the Chinese language. If fen si is out, they say, then what about sha fa, or sofa, which entered the Chinese dictionary in the last century? And if WTO and GFP can appear in official documents and textbooks, then why not PK [Player Kills, a term derived from computer games]?

Sitting at a school computer, Mengnan suggests the language guardians face a losing battle even if they may have a point.

"Internet dialect has become a part of our life and I don't think it can be banned," she says. "After all, you cannot silence us by stopping up our mouths."

Also, from the land of self-promotion-but-you-also-might-be-interested-in-this-new-technology, I was interviewed a few weeks ago for a UPI story (Me little late meeting sorry sorry) about Zlango, which is a soon-to-be-released SMS platform that communicates through a "lexicon" of icons, with the option to add in text at any point, though the point is to use less letters and words altogether, and more pictures. I hadn't heard of it before but there is some buzz about it in the blogosphere.

Gender differences in text messaging

2006-07-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

First off, hello all! I'm Steve from UT Linguistics, and I'm happy to be included in your discusssion. I mostly apply computational methods to lingusitic studies, including extracting linguistic and discourse features from dialogues, so hopefully my work will be of interest as we proceed.

Poking around the web while at work, I came across an interesting find on Rashmi Sinha's blog:

http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/06_06/gender-text-messages.html

The short story here is that men write short messages and women longer ones. Women's messages have a beginning, an end, and sometimes multiple threads within. Men's messages are much shorter and around a single issue.

This blog entry is a summary of work done by Simeon Yates at Sheffield Hallam University, and these data are all UK-based. For all I know, you're all already aware of this work (you do link to Discourse Analysis Online), but in the spirit of sharing, here's a the link:

http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cs/commstud/yates.html

Has anyone done work like this on blog entries?

I suppose I should keep this brief, as per my gender. Happy reading!

Destroying the English language

2006-04-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

...one chat at a time. Courtesy of ilani ilani comes linkage to an article in the Chicago Maroon, AOL-speak is destroying language’s beauty. Let's see what our writer has to say.

Language is precious, and being able to express oneself through writing, even in something as apparently trivial as an e-mail, is vital.

Trivial? Was that email you sent to your professor asking for an extension trivial?

AOL-speak strips all the beauty and nuance out of written language, converting it to a means rather than its own end, shifting the emphasis from quality of self-expression and communication to sheer speed, efficiency, and volume of dispatches. Personal communication used to mean something; people took time in the composition of correspondence and invested something of themselves in it. Now, however, cookie-cutter abbreviations have overrun the realm of language, leaving it a bleak, monosyllabic wasteland.

I'm sorry, but this is terribly confused. Rather than a means to efficiency, the use of abbreviations ARE that very self-expression the author talks about. OK, so we still need to do the studies on how much time abbreviations save you, but our hunch is not much, right?

Not everything one writes should aim to be high Shakespearean art. Yet writing should provide a source of pride. Anything a person writes, even if it is a quick e-mail, expresses something about him or her and comments on who he or she is. Language is not merely a means but an end in itself, a fundamental method of self-expression. It is something to be reveled in, played with, and enjoyed as our greatest, most enduring cultural inheritance, not cheapened, commodified, and distilled to its barest essence. Efficiency of communication is not all that really matters.

AIMspeak is play, dude! Get with it!

Alas, colleagues, I write this not to lampoon a college reporter who clearly struggles with anal retentiveness - there are plenty of people like that, and it's not my place to judge them. Rather, I write this to encourage you to check out the comments section of both the article, and also a link to the article on digg.com. It's a beauteous little dataset of language ideology-heavy comments. Enjoy!

non-internet-researcher internet-research

2006-04-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

now that my courses are moving into paper writing mode, i've noticed that a lot of the sociolinguists in my department, students and faculty alike, are doing research using interactions held through online mediums as (usually) secondary or (occasionally) primary sources of data. the the majority of it is taken from blogs and social network site forums, though i've also seen chat treated the same way. the interest isn't specifically in this kind of discourse as written discourse, or how the sequential organization or discourse markers or notable linguistic variables of internet discourse operate among speakers and communities, but does anyone wonder if these kind of issues will come up if this trend continues? i.e. how valuable would it be for the researcher interested in language practices that index bisexual identity (for example), who happens to study an online community of self-identified bisexuals, to be aware of the structures of online talk?

in theory, this could be a gorgeous enterprise to publish on.

narrow transcriptions of CMD

2006-04-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

as someone who's real into conversation analysis and similar kinds of micro-analyses of discourse, i've always been a little, well, discontent with the kinds of data used to carry out this type of research. a lot of it is done using logfiles, which fails to capture a whole mess of things like detailed measurements of silences, error correction done in the message composition process, and meta details of the interaction that don't show in the chat or message box (this can range from actions and gestures from avatars to temporary messages such as 'your buddy is typing'). the use of transcription methods similar to those used to transcribe spoken discourse can potentially fix some of these problems, though the conventions of those systems need to be almost completely scrapped if we want to transcribe synchronous online interactions.

i've seen two systems that attempt to do this (i'm sure there are more, and i'd love citations if anyone has them). both rely on video recordings of interactions which are later transcribed with a unique set of conventions: garcia and jacobs 1999, which captures very narrow detail about chatroom discourse but has a transcription style that is very awkward to read; and markman 2006, also of chat discourse, which is much simpler on the eyes but captures a broader level of detail than garcia and jacobs. adding to the bunch, here's my take on the whole transciption movement, a work in progress in transcribing instant message discourse:

raclaw_instant_message_transcription.doc

and the video that it's based off of:

convo_one_modern_short.mov

i know this is of interest to only a piece of this readership, so comment as necessary.

Virtual visits

2006-03-20T08:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's NYT SundayStyles provides us with another compelling research question: when the best interest of children is concerned, what is enough to make a successful "virtual visit" with a distant parent? In this article, opinions are exchanged as to the value of internet-enabled contact (including webcams, instant messaging, emailing, etc.) as a supplement to and/or substitute for F2F visits between children and divorced parents. (See InternetVisitation for more news, articles, definitions, and how-tos.) There's a definite legal angle to the article, with much discussion of custody agreements that include (or don't) allowances for virtual visits as counting for "real" visits.

As the legal system begins to acknowledge the potential benefits of technology in bridging the physical and emotional distance caused by divorce and separation, more families are experimenting with computer-assisted custody sharing.

Although any separating couple can opt for virtual visits in their custody agreement, debate surrounding the issue is unfolding on the state level as advocates push to have the option spelled out in state laws in order to broaden awareness of the practice and enable judges to grant such visits where they see fit.

Though most people in the article talk about the good things for parents who have already moved away - a webcam session is more satisfying than a phone call - there are also arguments made that allowing parents to visit their children virtually will encourage parents to move away, because it relieves them of the responsbility to be around.

"The danger is that it will become a substitute for real time," said David L. Levy, chief executive of the Children's Rights Council, based in Hyattsville, Md., which advocates for children affected by divorce and separation. "Virtual time is not real time. You can't virtually hug your child or walk your child to school. We don't want this to be seen as an excuse to encourage move-aways."

The Utah and Wisconsin regulations specify that virtual visits should be used as a supplement to, not a substitute for, traditional visits. The Wisconsin bill also specifies that virtual visits should not be used to justify a custodial parent's relocation. The laws define "electronic communication" as contact by video conference, e-mail, instant message, telephone or other wired or wireless technology.

"I think that most judges understand that children require physical one-on-one contact with the absent parent," said Cheryl Lynn Hepfer, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

Which raises the question: how closely can technology approximate "real time" contact, and how closely does it need to in order to provide the kind of interaction that young children need with their parents? This isn't so much linguistic in nature, but issues like nonverbal cues, technological aspects of online conversation - delayed response, for instance - would be important if you really wanted to figure this out.

Anyway, I just thought it was another interesting and important real-world issue that makes our interests relevant. This message brought to you by the Committee to Make Academics Matter (CMAM).

group hug.

2006-03-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

so i've been reviewing abstracts for the upcoming internet research conference, and there's been a startling lack of papers not only on language use in general, but especially the type of social discourse approach that we usually take on this blog. it got me thinking about one of rae's last posts about possible conference collaboration. last year a few of us talked tentatively about getting a panel together at some point - any ideas on that? possible conferences, possible panel topics, possible research areas?

a tiny thread on synchronicity.

2006-03-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

so i was sitting around this morning and writing on levels of synchronicity in forms of internet discourse, explaining how synchronous forms can act asynchronously on occasion and asynchronous forms can function synchronously on occasion and how the consideration of quasi-synchronous mediums is always there on the sidelines. and i thought, hell, maybe it would make things clearer if i referred to instant messages as prototypically synchronous, and email as prototypically asynchronous, for example, just to allow for all of those other differentiations in the terminology.

that's it, really. adopt my jargon now.

Student/professor email boundaries

2006-02-21T19:27:00.000-08:00

An article yesterday in the NYT (via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber) examines the effect of email "erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance" from professors. Professors are complaining about emails they get from students asking them inane questions, or else admitting to embarrassing things (like drinking too much = can't come to class). The upshot of such emailing, the article says, is that students aren't showing as much "deference" to professors as they used to.

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated.

"The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

This conclusion doesn't make complete sense, since one of the complaints is that students are asking professors for TOO much help, or for help on issues for which they aren't expecting to be drafted into counselor duty (like what kind of notebook to buy for class). I suggest that while it's probably true that email has fostered kids sharing or asking some things they normally wouldn't (as one [the only, actually] student quoted in the article said, it's easier to email than to walk across campus to an office), email is also probably a tool that's been found useful to forward a trend that was already taking place: the division between professors and students weakening (see Daniel Drezner for more on this). Something like where professors are your "friend." I think there's a general and gradual shift, here in the States anyway, away from formally enacted power dynamics, especially in situations like academia - is it because of technology? I doubt it, but it helps it along. Any thoughts on this?

The article also mentions a trend of students criticizing either the teacher or their fellow students in emails to professors; this, of course, can be perceived of a stepping over of students' allowed roles by telling the teacher what to do. From personal experience, email has probably made students more comfortable asking for things they used to view as a big deal: paper extensions, grade raises, re-writes. What's important seems that professors and students actually communicate IN CLASS about what the professor's email style is - and I've had professors do this: don't email me on the weekend, I don't like email at all, etc. And let's not forget that not every professor finds these kinds of emails (the ones mentioned in the article) annoying; some people enjoy hearing more from their students, regardless of the modality in which that occurs, and regardless of how off-topic it might seem.

For more blogosphere discussion this article from those within the academy, see Easily Distracted, xoom, Discourse.net, and Althouse. (The comments sections are often the most interesting parts of these posts.)

divorce and CMC

2006-02-21T19:16:00.000-08:00

for all the SMS fans in the crowd:

in saudi, traditional law dictates that should a man desire to divorce his wife, he does so by telling her, thrice, that he divorces her. it's your prototypical performative. apparently there's been a string of men texting this divorce message to their wives, thrice, and the law has no idea whether to allow it.

i can't find any articles on the topic that aren't written in arabic, but malaysia and singapore, who have similar divorce procedures, have already had to consider this in the courts.

i don't want to belittle the issue by comparing it to dumping your girlfriend over myspace, so i won't.

talking about online gaming, styleshifting, and bell's theory of audience design.

2006-02-18T12:35:00.000-08:00

one of my big interests in computer-mediated discourse is the notion of styleswitching, so i was really excited when i checked the penny arcade blog this morning and saw a letter to one of the authors from the president of sony online entertainment. to put it into context - penny arcade has become a concrete authority on video games, especially for a good chunk of the online gaming community, and a bad review by them is likely going to drop sales on a title. the letter is a response to one such review:

Normally I like you guys a lot.. even when you dig on us.. but it felt like you went personal on our artists. Low blow IMO

We have some of the most talented artists in the business and EQ II is a gorgeous game. Certainly art style is a subjective thing.. and if you want to bag on the art then that’s certainly your right. But unless and until you’ve had any of your art in a game calling people robots just seems weak.

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

just considering the author, i was expecting a letter with less CMD-specific features - you know, given his probable age, his position as president, the strong likelihood that he isn't sitting around on AIM with his buddies every afternoon, etc. despite that, he's overusing those ellipses, he's missing a period, he's got that little IMO acronym. i wasn't satisfied with the thought that maybe this was just the way he typed, so i looked him up and found a question and answer session via slashdot. this time he's talking with individual gamers who don't carry the weight to affect sony sales the way penny arcade might:

There are long threads that I've started myself on our forums, but we have community representatives that are answering questions diligently on our forums already, and I'm very involved in what's being said. I'm trying to get the word out in other venues and we know that Slashdot has a wide reach into the online gamer audience in general and the SWG community. Btw, I try to personally answer all of the emails from our players that are written to me and I get a fair number of them each day from our players.

this still has a slight CMD feel to it, especially with the way he dropped a BTW in there, which makes sense considering audience design - he's speaking to gamers on both accounts. but this example is in a noticeably different style than the letter above, and these differences aren't just in the more formal lexical choices he pulls out in the Q&A. i'm really interested in the punctuation differences between the two pieces of text, and i'm wondering if there's anything significant difference between the capitalization differences of 'IMO' in the first example and 'Btw' in the second - googling any kind of CMC acronym shows that they're much more likely to be either capitalized completely or not at all. it's worth considering how he's using CMD-specific variables to index closeness or distance (power or solidarity?) with his interlocutors.

presenting on CMC at berkeley (or: the boy who lived)

2006-02-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

keeping alive the tradition of discussing academic conferences as maybe relevant to cyber linguists, i thought i would briefly post about presenting at the annual meeting of the berkelely linguistics society this past weekend.

my paper was on the use of the ellipsis in computer-mediated discourse. a good part of the paper was descriptive in nature, talking about traditional uses that have been adapted by speakers in CMD (e.g. representing silence or hesitation) and some innovative uses that have popped up (e.g. typing dot dot dots in place of periods, commas, semi-colons, lexical conjunctions, etc., and the different grammatical and social [both situational and metaphorical] contexts in which this feature is most likely to appear). a large portion of the paper also addressed the notion of whether CMC should be approached as more closely approximating standards of written text, spoken discourse, or as a mixed modality. rather than picking sides, i argued that this was not so much a constant designation for CMC, but more likely an ideology that speakers approached differently and which shaped their discourse appropriately, and that linguistic style in CMC could be dependent on this ideology. that's how i framed a majority of the variation of ellipsis use among the speakers from my corpus, anyway.

i wasn't sure how this paper would be received at the conference, which doesn't focus on sociolinguistics that strongly in the first place, and which surely hadn't been overrun by CMC studies in the past (though the 2003 meeting had a presentation on online communications in japanese which i'm going to try to get my hands on). i was thrown into the session on discourse and pragmatics, and due to being scheduled concurrently with a major parasession on argument structures, as well as in the later part of the last day of the conference, the audience was a bit sparse. it was also completely filled with graduate students rather than tenured scholars. that put me at ease some, since it was likely that all of them were at least somewhat familiar with talking on the internet.

the presentation was well-received considering what it was and where it was, and i actively engaged with three of the eighteen particpants. there wasn't nearly as much constructive criticism as there might have been at an internet-studies conference, or even one that focused solely on social interactions and more adored the notions of styleshifting and language ideologies, but it felt kind of validating for our subfield of a subfield to present on the language of CMC at a conference on linguistics. even if i did get some completely blank stares during the beginning of my talk.

Txt: emoticonography, performativity, Hitler?!

2006-01-25T08:25:00.000-08:00

Sunday's NYT Magazine contained a piece about txt msgng by Charles McGrath. There are some interesting things in here, first off the neologism emoticonography, which is a new term to me and has about 240 Google hits. It appears in a MetaFilter post from October here, where the user says they "just made that word up;" it is the title of an article explaining communication on IRC; and way back in 1994, someone used it in an email posted to the American Dialect Society's listserv.

Next, there's the comparison of text messaging language to hip-hop usage:

As with any language, efficiency isn't everything. There's also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of "z" for "s," for example, "a," for "er" and "d" for "th." Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call "performative"; it's writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point.

There are a couple of things about making this comparison to hip-hop: hip-hop isn't written as much as it's spoken, and when it's written (in liner notes, for instance?) it's written to imitate speech. But there's no constraint on space or time like there is in texting, and it seems that a lot of the stylistic things also have to do with these constraints, like "a" for "er" and "d" for "th," both of which minimize characters. I'm also unclear about this explanation of performativity as writing wanting to be speech; "showing off" being "part of the point" actually seems more on target, though in terms of what it does for you socially, not in terms of just "performing."

I really didn't know emoticons were being used this much, especially in text messaging as opposed to IM, IRC, chat, or BBS. Apparently there's even an emoticon for Hitler: ( /.#( ) I also haven't heard the terms "lateral" and "penetrative" used (the author claims that txtng is the former, according to scholars); is this a communication concept?

Perhaps the most interesting part is the discussion about the suitability of different languages to text messaging:

The Chinese language is particularly well-suited to the telephone keypad, because in Mandarin the names of the numbers are also close to the sounds of certain words; to say "I love you," for example, all you have to do is press 520. (For "drop dead," it's 748.)

I'd like to know more about this; does anyone know of any studies? Surely they're out there.

Finally, the article concludes with a morality tale, stemming from the fact that text messages are used primarily for "greasing the social wheels" functions, a way of reiterating that we have connections, be they electronic or real. He's probably right about that, but then he writes this:

"We're all wired together" is the collective message, and we'll signal again in a couple of minutes, not to say anything, probably, but just to make sure the lines are still working. The most depressing thing about the communications revolution is that when at last we have succeeded in making it possible for anyone to reach anyone else anywhere and at any time, it turns out that we really don't have much we want to say.

This desperation seems to come out of nowhere, especially since earlier in the article he talks about how txt is used to flirt, ask on dates, break up, etc. But even if the whole point is just to grease the wheels, why would we be expected to "say something"? Is it different from Hi howareyou haveaniceday what'sup takecare?

Gender + internet, Text + love

2006-01-04T07:49:00.000-08:00

Over a month with no posts! Woe!

Here are a couple of things I've been storing up the past few days.

1. New Pew Internet and American Life study on gender differences in internet use:

How Women and Men Use the Internet: Women are catching up to men in most measures of online life. Men like the internet for the experiences it offers, while women like it for the human connections it promotes.

Pew director Lee Rainie and BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin spoke with NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday about the report. Another guest, a performer in the play Defending the Caveman, explained the differences with a hunter-gatherer metaphor of internet use. As in, women are gatherers, gathering contacts and communiques, whereas men are hunters, seeking out facts and information. The metaphor seems a bit shaky to me, but whatever. His foundation seems to be:

In principle, internet users have high regard for the internet as a tool of communication; 85% of both men and women say they consider the internet to be a good way to interact or communicate with others in their everyday lives.7 But similarities end there. Men and women differ in their modes of online communication, in what they communicate about, and in how much they value their online communications.

That's a bold claim, there, for some pretty close-to-being-similar differences. For instance, while women are more likely to email than men (94%-W v. 88%-M), men and women are about equally as likely to IM (42%-M v. 39%-W), send greetings (41%-M v. 44%-W), or text message (33%-M v. 37%-W) [none of those latter three differences are statistically significant]. Now this is sort of interesting, given that women are said to seek more highly interactional or "involved" communication, which you'd think would be fostered by IM, not email. So I suppose this is just saying that women are communicating more in general - though men are slightly more likeley to use chat rooms (24%-M v. 20%-W), and more likely to use internet phone (9%-M v. 5%-W), so hmm. There are more detailed findings about the kinds of email and so forth - check it out.

2. Text messaging in the Washington Post

Life and Romance in 160 Characters or Less: Brevity Gains New Meaning as Popularity of Cell Phone Text Messaging Soars

Another article about text messages and their use to flirt, facilitate dates, and (gasp!) break up. Some interesting comments about speed:

The brevity of a text message gives it a certain poetic beauty, said Washington resident Erik Lung, 34. As in enigmatic haiku, there is lots of space for reading between lines, particularly in an early-stage romance.
"You can send a quick little message saying you're thinking of her," the operations research analyst said. Then "you start paying attention not only to what the message says, but you care about the response time." There's a meta-message: The shorter the response time, the more she cares.

And about language:

Now, text messaging -- like its older cousin instant messaging -- is giving rise to a new, electronic written culture that is truncating all of that [reflection, contemplation. - ed.]. A text message sent via mobile phone is usually confined to 160 characters or less and takes several seconds to send. To accommodate this short form, language is acquiring acronyms -- "H8" (hate), "iluvu" (I love you) and "ruok" (are you okay) -- that allow text messages and other instant messages to relay information about life's mundane details as well as its emotional brambles.
...
Messaging alters language and composition style, said Tom Keeney, director of messaging for T-Mobile USA. Slang has gotten more detailed and sophisticated, making it possible to say more on a tiny canvas, much like poetry, he said. "It's almost like letters gave way to postcards. It was a way to say something on the go."

Nothing too heavy here, but always nice to see normal people interviewed about their thoughts on these technologies.

As *I* (though not necessarily anyone else) would write in a text message: Hap New Yr!

Predictive text "gobbledygook"

2005-11-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

The Language Legend has a post up about this Guardian article about predictive text's inanities ("Why can't my mobile spell properly?"). More interesting is this post by a commenter, Rusty:

Did you see Stephen Fry's appearance on Friday Night with Jonathon Ross some weeks ago? On it he mentioned how kids/teenagers are starting to use "book" to mean "cool", because as you try to type "cool" using predictive text -- 2665 -- the first result is... yes, "book", and people are too lazy to press the extra key to change to the next 2665-entry. So we now have people going around saying things like "that is so book!" I find that quite fascinating. :)

1. Heart Stephen Fry.

2. Wow.

In the article itself, the author mostly just rants about silly spellings the mobile comes up with (undu, flaunaue, and Painbusys instead of tofu, flatmate, and Sainsbury's). One wants to ask the user to just stop using predictive text if it's so irksome, but he's right: the dictionaries on some of the phones are pretty weird. It's an industry I don't know much about, but the implications for language use and linguistic attitudes are undoubtedly worth considering - as the popular media again points out to us. If interested in txt and especially predictve, for starters, I suggest visiting the work of Rich Ling, if you haven't yet (a sociologist, not linguist, but near enough to be relatedly interesting).

What do yall make of this?

2005-11-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

A friend brought this message board thread to my attention. At the moment, I'm kinda dumbstruck with what to think of it... but there are some interesting language judgments contained within and kind of "hyper-internet variety" being used throughout.

Gendered txt

2005-11-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

Via Netwoman comes the tale of two recent stories about gender issues in text messaging, both about a study led by Simeon Yates (Sheffield Hallam).

They found that men's texts are "shorter and use more sarcasm and swearing than those sent by women," according to the BBC News article. Messages are also longer when men are talking to women, and most interestingly, men will text their lady friends when out with their dude friends in order to avoid appearing less dude-like by actually talking on the phone to their lady friends:

"It has become common to text when you want to keep communication private, especially if you are in a group. An obvious example is that a man is more likely to text than phone his partner when he is out with friends or peers. This prevents him by losing face by switching from 'friend' mode to 'partner' mode in front of his peers," says Dr Yates.

The Yorkshire Post article is a little more ridiculous:

For years women have been battling to keep up sides with men and prove themselves to be equal in all ways. But researchers in Sheffield have proved that in the modern world there is one key difference – and that is in the way that we text.

Right. Anyway, that article's explication of the length and content findings is:

Messages between men are shorter than those between women, and text messages from men get longer when they are texting women. There are also significant differences in the content of messages men and women exchanged, men being much more likely to use sarcasm, sexual humour and swearing. Women are more likely to show support and affection. They also rarely swear, use little sarcasm, often put themselves down -– something men never do in their texts.

Because these are pop media articles, I don't know where the academic source is - Yates' homepage turns up nothing.

As Netwoman points out, this is certainly not surprising, but I want to see more about the differences in men talking to men v. men talking to women v. women talking to women v. women talking to men. I'd also like to know how more linguistic issues figure in here, and how they were used in determining the meaning of the content - do emoticons signal "support" and/or "affection" and/or "sarcasm"? Does an all-caps SWEAR WORD count as more of a swear word than a no-caps one?

Election results Leet thread

2005-11-08T20:14:00.000-08:00

(Ok, I know it's not really a 'thread' since this is a blog, but whatever.)

I just saw this blog headline:

RUMOR: Kaine PWNz

[Kaine would be our now-governor (god I hope the press calls are correct) Tim Kaine.]

I expect there might be an interesting array of these types of headlines tonight/tomorrow. It might be fun to collect. Not necessarily academic, but since we were already on the topic of Leet, why not?

Interestingly, this same blog also has this headline:

X Virginia Blog Carnival X

Somebody explain the "X___X" formation to me again? I was once told the origin but don't remember.

WHOAH. Come to search for it, this blog is crazy for PWN. There're three more headlines involving PWN:

PWN NATION
Virginia Pwns!
VAPAF: OMG OMG Brad PWN’d

OMG OMG PWN PWNz.

more linguistic variation in cmc.

2005-11-06T15:36:00.000-08:00

speaking of cmc-specific registers:

if NE1 is up 4 goin out 2day u can call me!

i thought this kind of speech style had died awhile ago, but evidently it's still alive and well. i know the lay term 'aol speak' is thrown around to describe it, but that's more a register reference, and also encompasses a whole mess of other features (and will probably also get our asses sued by AOL) - is there a better reference for the actual alphanumeric-y feature used here? any articles that talk about it?

otherwise, you know, feel free to make up your own.

7h15 1z teh r0xx0r!!!!!!111!!!!one!!!!!!!!!1

2005-11-02T21:11:00.000-08:00

a couple of weeks ago wikipedia was hit with a string of racist or otherwise offensive additions to its entry on rosa parks, one of which went a little something like this:

Rosa Parks FINALLY GOT PWNED at the age of 92 on [...]

which sounded to me like a classical example of styleshifting (codeswitching?) to reference some sort of identity or language ideology, and it made me wonder how CMC scholars have looked at l337 using more than a purely descriptivist approach. it's a pretty loaded CMC-specific register (style? orthography? cyberlect?) and it's gone through a pretty interesting cycle of use over the years.

if anyone has seen any academic articles written on any facet of l337, or any thoughts or anecdotes or what have you, i'd love to hear them.

Computer-Mediated Anthropology

2005-10-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

After doing some snooping (beware the snooping internetter!) around the LJ environs of one of our commenters, I found the Computer-Mediated Anthropology (CMA) website. It's got links to anthropologists doing cyberculture studies, various and sundry resources, bibliographies, a blog, and a list of CMA-friendly (or unfriendly, as the case may be) Anthro departments, which I'm presently going to go scouring...check it! It is run by Noah Porter at the University of South Florida.

Part of what's interesting here is to see, just from a quick glance, that there's some differing terminology from what the CMC lit uses, which is likely a product of the disciplinary framework (or is it?) - e.g., "Advanced Information Technologies" instead of "Information and Communication Technologies." I'd like to get a better handle on this kind of differing terminology and how it indicates that we're conceptualizing things/operationalizing concepts.

lemke and education.

2005-10-27T21:59:00.000-07:00

so jay lemke came to campus tonight.

for those of you not familiar with his work, jay works in education at the university of michigan, and his work is at the fringe of sociolinguistics, social policy, and the hard sciences. his talk veered towards his current research on online communities based around online gaming and various MMORPGs, specifically how the strong group dynamic and the learning potential of a virtual environment could be used towards the ends of improving education. he painted a picture of a university curriculum where students could learn about physics be controlling an avatar that performs experiments in a virtual world. it's an interesting prospect, maybe complicated by the socioeconomic stratification and gendered division of current users of such programs, but maybe being a contributing factor to making this part of the internet more accessible.

thoughts? comments?

Multiple IM Conversations and Judgments

2005-10-26T05:31:00.000-07:00

A question that popped into my head when responding to therese's comment...

Does it bother you if you're having a conversation with someone else and they're not attentive to the conversation becasue you think they're having a conversation with someone else. This can often be signaled explicitly by mis-aimed interlocutions (i.e. you're having a conversation with someone about your bad day and they respond by mistake in your window to a conversation they're having with someone else in another window). Do we see this as acceptable, or do we think that our interlocutor isn't engagaed and focused on our conversation? Do we ignore these things?

To what extent do we expect to be the sole focus of attention during IM interactions (in diadic conversations)? In FTF settings, this lack of focus would normally be construed as "rude", where one person would in essence be having a conversation with 2 people at one time. Does this "rudeness" transfer to IM? Do people feel guilty about talking to 2 people at once, when one of the conversations is "important" (dealing with personal problems, exposing some weakness, etc.) Do we demand the attention of our interlocutors, or do we realize that IM is in fact different than FTF in this regard?

Infrastructure and Language Ideologies

2005-10-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

So we know that your connection speed and your proficiency at typing influences how fast you are able to communicate online in "synchronous" environments. If you use a 28.8 k modem on a shitty telephonic infrastructure (the type normally found in places like sub-saharan africa, latin and south america) "synchronous" becomes more "asynchronous". similarly, the same dichtomy is blurred if you grew up in a place or time where typing instruction wasn't available to you. given this brief context, the following questions apply:

1) What are the judgments people make about the relationship between speed of interaction (or fluidity of turn taking in interaction) and judgments about their interlocutor. For instance, are they judged to be "smarter" if they type fast or "slower" if they type slow? Do people in fact judge based on typing speed.

2) Will (or possibly has) the internet group(ed) into "those that have the ability to communicate synchronously through synchonous media" and those that do not? What are the demographics of the two groups? Where are they located? Are the same social forces replicated online as we see FTF?

3) assuming these groups to exist, are there different language strategies (yielding different linguistic variables) employed by the two groups. what effect do they have on how they're percieved?

rapid fire :|

OMG NYT article on IM etc.

2005-10-23T10:23:00.000-07:00

Go read this article, from NYT Sunday Styles, now. Better yet, get a print version if you can, because there's a killer screenshot of some IM convos between two teenagers. And we can discuss.

I'm running out the door, but two things:

1. The mother refers to IM as "the I.M." and her daughter's iPod as "the iPod." As in, "She's always either on the IM or playing the iPod." I feel like using definite articles here is definitely a sign of an out-grouper.

2. A girl in the article talks about the fun of having five-way IM conversations. Do we have a hunch as to how prevalent it is for IM convos to be between more than two people? I still think it's less than the one-to-one, but is its group chat function growing?

3. Multitasking sure is the theme of the year.

interactional syntax.

2005-10-22T10:41:00.000-07:00

since schegloff has already been brought up here:

not too long ago i read through his article on the relevance of repair to a syntax-for-conversation, and i started thinking about how relevant studies of interactional syntax could be when applied to CMD. when it comes to hardcore linguistics i'm more into phonology and comparative ling, but even i'm interested in how things like acronyms, text play, and emoticons must shape the structure of utterances.

a large list of schegloff's papers in pdf format can be downloaded here, if you want to read straight from the source.

any thoughts or reading suggestions can go into the comment box - but, you know, we're dealing with syntax, so i won't be too surprised if this gets unresponded to.

interaction terminology.

2005-10-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

i know the topic has been mentioned before in personal communications, but i want to get this straight, because this is an academic blog and kind of carries some weight.

or something.

when we're discussing the internet in opposition or parallel to something occuring in the realm of non-internet, is there a good piece of terminology available outside of face-to-face or, even worse, real life? it's not like all offline interaction is face-to-face, and, well, i'm not even touching the notion of real life.

conference calls.

2005-10-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

tis the season to submit abstracts.

if you're planning to submit a paper/poster abstract to any of the many conferences within the next few weeks, here's a mini-forum to post titles, name conferences, and ask questions about another's proposed research.

the hot hardcore.

2005-10-13T23:27:00.000-07:00

so going on that penultimate discussion string, are there any thoughts about perceived speaker identity versus actual speaker demographic? i've never come across this in face-to-face interaction studies, though i'm sure it must have been looked at before - maybe in considering the omnipresence of heterosexuality in queer linguistics?

Chat bibliography site

2005-10-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

I just found the amazing Bibliography on Chat Communication. Seriously, it's incredible - you can view in alphabetical order, filter by language, and filter by chronology. Bravo to this site's owner!

Voice over IP

2005-10-12T06:27:00.000-07:00

Here's a bit of an interesting conversation. They're initially discussing the use of 'voice over IP' in online video games, and then it kind of shifts to discussing the relationship between how people "speak" and how they "write". Finally, at the end, we see the beginning of an explicit discussion about language choice between offline and online forms.

Pepe:
Played a bit on UT2004 with headphones + many people, and no, my experience was not hysterical. plenty of kids, but not much talking, and no shouts and yells and wtfs

Pepe :
extremely practical for "between levels" sessions

Pepe :
to rearrange teams, to adapt difficulty, etc

Pepe :
and also, played to Pandora tomorrow with that. It's even part of the game. Since you play 2 vs 2, each team can speak without the other team listening. However, in-game, there's a gadget that allows you to spy on the other team's convo. extremely useful

Pepe:
since, the game is 75% about tactics

Pepe :
= since the game is

Boris:
but people's style and vocabulary, or grammar, is more like everyday talk or like forum/chat sessions ?

Boris :
no, it's casual talking

Pepe:
very very often, people tend to speak as few words as they can

Pepe:
to not to pollute the discussion, since you cant "see" people talking, you cant know either when they want to speak

Pepe:
so, very few words, very "up-to-the-point" convos

Pepe :
also, very often, people tend to try to sound "pro"

Pepe:
as in "ridiculously" pro

Boris:
acronyms and such ?

Pepe :
hmmm

Pepe:
not necessarily. rather some "It's better to use the cricrigun on the factorygizzy level because with 0.25 seconds left, you can sprintstrafejump to the second base, and touchdown in the platform'

Pepe :
that, you hear a lot

(Hanz returns to chat after an absence)

Hanz :
jesus christ what have you cunts been chatting

Boris :
ethnocyberlinguistics.

Hanz :
wicked.

Pepe:
to be honest, I don't believe that my experience in chatting online while playing games is immense. But from the little I've seen, there's not much difference than there would be between people that would not know each other, playing in a cybercafe together

Boris:
i think so, but would people playing together in a cybercafe talk the same way as people playing together around a table (or in a gym room)...

Boris:
...or is their language a bit adapted to the cyber style (of forums, chat windows, etc).

Pepe:
hmm, nope, I don't believe so

Pepe:
Related to the video-game, no doubt, related to the online situation, I doubt so

Hanz :
simply angry little youths who get far too easily frustrated and can shriek at strangers with pretty much zero chance of rebuttal

Hanz :
can bet your arse that if that kid in the video was in a cybercaff, he'd just be quietly steaming

Boris:
No, it's not about behaviour, it's really about forms of language and communication.

Boris :
Behaviour is a whole other issue.

Hanz :
what, "FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FAG WAAAAARGH AAAARRRRGH FUUUUUUUUUUCK"?

Boris:
:haha:

Hanz:
^^

Pepe :
Ho

Pepe:
Very related, however

Boris:
well, "FUCK YOU" is one thing, "STttFFFFüüüüü" is another.

undergraduate delineations.

2005-10-11T21:42:00.000-07:00

two posts from an online message board used by the course i'm TAing:

I think its so frustrating that so much of language is based on phonics and accents. Have you ever noticed that when you are talking on instant messenger it is so easy to misread the tone of a conversation? You can say a sentence out loud in 5 different ways and have it have different meanings. While email is informal and easy, Im so afraid that what Im writing is being misinterpreted. Especially since Im such a sarcastic person, I've definatly said " That is an awesome shirt" and had people take me seriously.

-----------------------

oh i totally agree(honestly i do) i mean i cant even count how many times ive had misunderstandings even fights start from the lack of vocal inflections that r lost online. your comment on the informality of email and the issues of actually reading a conversation has to make me wonder, is online "talking" spoken or written english. i wouldnt say it's exactly written, i mean it is informal, structured like talking not a paper or essay or even a written letter. however, with out the human interaction and verbal speaking i dont know if its classified as spoken language either! oh my.

are 'vocal inflections' completely lost online? speakers are going to figure out ways to get around that barrier somehow, aren't they?

another lauren-referential post

2005-10-10T14:36:00.000-07:00

so ms. squires was kind enough to share the paper she presented at this past weekend's aoir conference with a few of the early group members, and now i'm going to talk shit about it. in a good way.

-- the introduction to language, gender, and variation was really great. it referenced all the right people and illuminated the lack of variationist research in the field of internet discourse. i wept at its beauty.

-- i keep seeing references to chats and instant messages as near-synchronous mediums, and as they are functionally different from fully-synchronous forms, especially in terms of sequencing and turn taking, i'm calling them quasi-synchronous from here on out. the term is stolen from, i think, garcia and jacobs.

-- so there. i'm calling it QS-CMC.

-- the use of abbreviations and shortcuts within CMC gets its mention here. i've heard two arguments for this, both of which imply a desire for rapid speech. one is the classical conversation-analytic approach to turn-taking, that the turn structure of speech is competitive: given the quasi-synchronous nature of the mediums of chat and IM, the first speaker to submit their text to the application is going to get the floor. the other argument is for attempted synchronicity, essentially providing less lag between statements to appear more like face-to-face speech.

-- so is the purpose of zero-apostrophe to gain this speed? statistically speaking, does it save that much time? and do the speakers perceive it to save time? is zero-apostrophe a feature that's active on the conscious level of the speaker?

-- and are there any opinions or research regarding the two arguments about speaker speed above? i see the CA approach as potentially more relevant, especially considering that traditional non-verbal or extralinguistic forms of speaker selection (eye gaze, pointing, intonation) are absent from the medium, which i think would bring a type-quicker/get-floor kind of mentality.

-- i see zero-apostrophe more as a representation of style, and i'm agreeing with the analysis that use of the feature is more a way to 'do' informality than a matter of synchronous-aspiring speed. i'm also thinking about the comparison between apostrophe to zero and ng to n in speech - it's a cool thought. when the nasal switch happens in CMC, though, it harkens back to an informal speech feature that both parties are absolutlely likely to be aware of, and is therefore reminiscent of any number of popular language ideologies. the zero-apostrophe doesn't function that way, though. and ... now i've forgotten where i was going with all of this. hell.

-- i'd like to know the demographic backgrounds of the guys and gals in this study, how these are functioning alongside gender in this analysis. i think the paper is right in that taking age and ethnicity and the rest into account alongside the gender factor would be a good area for future work.

-- has this variable been looked at in asynchronous CMC? this would a be a nice follow-up maybe.

again, mazel tov to the author for starting the hot new trend of punctuation as variation. anyone with a mind for sending around abstracts or working papers to the list should feel free to do so!

Speed in CMC, plus a promise for future non-self-referential posts

2005-10-10T08:45:00.000-07:00

So, here's a first roundup from IR 6.0, starting with the panel of which I was a part (excerpted, edited from here). Our panel was organized by Naomi S. Baron and titled "Rethinking Discourse in Cyberspace: The Role of Speed in Shaping CMC Behavior" (abstracts here). It was well attended (for which I’m grateful!) and very warmly received.

I presented my work on apostrophes as a linguistic variable in IM, and I got some good critical comments about the project that’ll help me craft this sort of research in the future, as well as any other versions of this paper. Basically I found that women used apostrophes much more than men (significantly more), and I tied it to the traditional findings in sociolinguistic research that women use more standard speech forms than men. This was kind of my attempt to start trying to applying sociolx methodologies to CMC, particularly with regards to variation, register, styleshifting, etc. So I was using a variationist type approach to see what would happen, and I was pretty happy with the results – though it’s only just a start. After this week I have so much else I want to start doing, who knows where all this energy will end up.

Rich Ling spoke about social dimensions of predictive text use and had some interesting things to report about the differences between those who use predictive text programs (PT) vs. those who use the “multi-tap” method, meanwhile reporting that studies have shown that speed of composition is actually minimally affected by PT. Speaking of cell phones, Erin Watkins then presented on “cellcerts” (“cellular phone” + “concert” = “cellcert”) among the Clay Aiken fan community. This is a phenomenon that seems like a high-tech upgrade on show taping and tape trading, but facilitated by cell phones and message boards (and hyperexcitable fans). Someone at the concert holds up their cell phone (we’ve all seen these people at shows) and the person at the other end writes about it on an online message board (like this one). The most interesting finding here, to me, is that about 2/3 of Watkins’ respondents preferred reading about concerts on the message boards – that is, those written by fans – than to read professional concert reviews. Now, there are undoubtedly a lot of reasons for this (like that Clay Aiken might not get the best reviews from traditional professional press, for instance), but it’s a nice suggestive finding that people would choose a fan as an authority over someone with established professional credentials. Or perhaps it just says that they’d rather read a narrative of the concert than a criticism of it.

Tim Clem and Brian Rabinovitz talked about their study on multitasking, the research design of which was stunning, if I do say so myself. They basically created an online survey which asks people to look, right now, at their browser to see what other programs they’re running, how many of them there are, what kind they are, how much they’re using each of them, where their attention is really focused, etc. Which is an excellent method, though of course it still has some of the self-report issues that any self-report study has. They also had interesting findings about multitasking behavior amongst their college-aged respondents: 89% were multitasking between being online and IMing, while 84% were multitasking between IMing and an offline (off-computer) task. Only 23% said that they often engage in only one IM conversation, whereas the average number of IM conversations is 2.5 going at a time.

All of which was wrapped up by Baron as an indication that much of online communication happens “under the radar”: it’s not our primary or sole activity engaged in whenever we’re engaged in it. It’s a backstage activity, in Goffman’s terms, or often even a backchannel activity, in ICT terminology. This means we get to choose who we talk to, and when, in what order we respond to all of those IMs. The allure of CMC, then, is not necessarily about speed in the sense of being able to rapidly communicate messages to people – but it is, I think, about being able to speed things up when we want to but being able to control the pace otherwise.

This is the same sort of thing I was trying to get at in my paper for AoIR 4.0, though less from the issue of speed than from the issue of communicative control overall. I have thought, and continue to think, that one of the most important effects of CMC and ICTs is that it affords us a level of control over the kind of interaction we have that hasn’t before been possible if we wanted to have extensive interaction at all. I’m just now going back to my 2003 paper, in fact, because I kept thinking of it this week when hearing what a lot of people were saying. So I find that a few things I wrote then are particularly applicable to the aspect of control that Baron is talking about, and since what I said then is basically what I would say now if I were writing anew, I’m just going to quote myself here:

[W]hile technology does not necessitate communication inferior to F2F communication (it is not so deterministic), each mode constitutes a unique domain—in technical characteristics as well as in users’ experiences with the media. Mode choice is a highly individual, contextual process; delegating certain content for discussion in certain communicative venues is a way to control information by choosing the realm in which the information will be exchanged. The technology users in this study are keenly aware of functional differences between technologies and choose to use media accordingly…

[T]he privilege formerly assigned to both visual and auditory cues in interpersonal communication may be weakening; what it means for a medium to engender “social presence” is also changing. Mediating technologies, and especially text-based forms, enable communication that is controllable to a higher degree than is F2F. If nonverbal cues are the least controllable aspect of communication, the fewer nonverbal cues it is possible to pick up or emit, the fewer uncontrollable elements (such as Goffman’s signals “given off”) enter the equation.

Baron engages us, rightly, to wonder what we gain or lose from gaining a certain measure of control over communication like this. How do ICTs upset, shift, negate, reinforce, etc. existing interactional dynamics (=social/power relations) as seen from this perspective?

Moreover, "under the radar" has a couple of different meanings. CMC not only can happen under the radar of our attention, as in multitasking between several tasks at once, but it also happens largely under the radar of traditional linguistic pressures. Which is where we come in.

As for the other really really awesome stuff that other people are doing, some of it terribly exciting to readers of this blog – I'll enthusiastically report back later in the week.

Is this thing on?

2005-10-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

Testing. I'm going to give this page some content in a day or two, reporting on the great discoveries from the Internet Research 6.0: Generations conference in Chicago. Stay tuned.