Electronic Discourse
Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space
Published on 2. October 1997
Book
Paperback/Softback
217 pages
978-0-7914-3476-5 (ISBN)
Description
Investigates the new world of computer conferencing and details how writers use language when their social interaction is exclusively enacted through text on screens.
This book examines interactive electronic discourse, exposing use of language that has the immediacy characteristic of speech and the permanence characteristic of writing. The authors created an asynchronous mainframe conference for language and linguistics classes in which they presented students with the task of analyzing the language used in original newspaper reports of the 1960s Civil Rights Sit-Ins. The authors observed how students wrote to each other across a wide range of social and virtual settings, how they built a real, if short-lived community within and across campus boundaries, and how they handled conflict while avoiding confrontation on sensitive issues of race and power. The result is a study that details how people use language when their social interaction is exclusively enacted through text on screens, and how their exchange is affected by computer conferencing.
The students who wrote in the electronic conferences faced two interrelated tasks: participating in a multiparty "conversation" and negotiating the individual identities they presented to one another in their virtual space. Individual writers used their own idiolects to influence the form and content of electronic discourse, adapting their own tacit knowledge of conversational strategies and written discourse to the new medium, as they created a real, although temporary, community.
In the electronic universe, writers adapt conventions of oral and written discourse to their own individual communicative ends. Electronic discourse, sometimes called computer mediated communication, presents us with texts in contact, and through those texts, their writers. Intertextuality in electronic conferences replaced a variety of conversational conventions. This book examines evidence for change, some trace of being and human interaction in virtual space, a domain where footprints are not in moondust but in ether.
This book examines interactive electronic discourse, exposing use of language that has the immediacy characteristic of speech and the permanence characteristic of writing. The authors created an asynchronous mainframe conference for language and linguistics classes in which they presented students with the task of analyzing the language used in original newspaper reports of the 1960s Civil Rights Sit-Ins. The authors observed how students wrote to each other across a wide range of social and virtual settings, how they built a real, if short-lived community within and across campus boundaries, and how they handled conflict while avoiding confrontation on sensitive issues of race and power. The result is a study that details how people use language when their social interaction is exclusively enacted through text on screens, and how their exchange is affected by computer conferencing.
The students who wrote in the electronic conferences faced two interrelated tasks: participating in a multiparty "conversation" and negotiating the individual identities they presented to one another in their virtual space. Individual writers used their own idiolects to influence the form and content of electronic discourse, adapting their own tacit knowledge of conversational strategies and written discourse to the new medium, as they created a real, although temporary, community.
In the electronic universe, writers adapt conventions of oral and written discourse to their own individual communicative ends. Electronic discourse, sometimes called computer mediated communication, presents us with texts in contact, and through those texts, their writers. Intertextuality in electronic conferences replaced a variety of conversational conventions. This book examines evidence for change, some trace of being and human interaction in virtual space, a domain where footprints are not in moondust but in ether.
Reviews / Votes
"This book describes a longitudinal study of college students acquiring and using one type of this new discourse, computer conferencing. The work is especially valuable because it describes use in as natural a setting as possible." -Denise Murray, San Jose State UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Albany, NY
United States
Target group
US School Grade: College Graduate Student and over
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
390 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7914-3476-5 (9780791434765)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Boyd H. Davis is Professor in the Department of English, University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Her work includes Dimensions of Language and Writing about Literature and Film (with Margaret B. Bryan), among others. Jeutonne P. Brewer is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She has written Dialect Clash in America: Issues and Answers (with Paul D. Brandes), among others.
Content
Preface
1:// A first look at electronic discourse
On defining electronic discourse
Writing that reads like conversation
Speaking and writing: Biber's dimensions
Multidisciplinary perspectives
Selected approaches to discourse analysis
Description of the corpus
Using the concordance: An example
2:// Context and contact in electronic discourse
Repetition in electronic conference discourse
An emergent register
Electronic conferences as "Town meetings"
Changing contexts within a conference
Some purposes behind repetition in electronic discourse
3:// Entering the conferences: Challenges of time and space
Electronic writing: The "early" period
The subject of the conferences: What students brought as "given"
Setting and participants: A closer look
Accessing the conference: The challenge of spaces
Space and time in the arrangement of conference texts
The impact of realigned times and settings on monitor screens
The challenge of expectations about genre
Replies as new frames
4:// Titles: Form and function in electronic discourse
The impact of conference topography
Conventions of direct address in titles
Titles as suggestive of self-disclosure
The titling game and its impact
Managing community: Software and moderator impact
5:// Defining the territory
Individual views of the territory
Guarding the territory
Syntactic cues: Personal pronouns
It behaves differently
Genderin the territory
Brent's territorial moves
6:// Taking a stance: Text, self, and other
Aspects of modality
Modality: A range of definitions
The individual and the text
Verb classes
Contexts and modal verbs
A change in audience
7:// Aspects of emulation
Popularity and rhythm
Moving to reflexive writing
Emulation across distance and space in the Transparent Conference
Adjacency-pairs in the Transparent Conference
Frame and focus in Topic 2
Some features of audience in the Transparent Conference
Flocking behaviors in mainframe conferences
8:// Emulating a strategy: The rhetorical question
Features of rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions from the Stand-Alone Conference
Rhetorical questions in the Transparent Conference
9://Conclusion
Going across local boundaries
Reading the text after the conference
A notion of virtual community
A final comment
Appendices
References
Index
1:// A first look at electronic discourse
On defining electronic discourse
Writing that reads like conversation
Speaking and writing: Biber's dimensions
Multidisciplinary perspectives
Selected approaches to discourse analysis
Description of the corpus
Using the concordance: An example
2:// Context and contact in electronic discourse
Repetition in electronic conference discourse
An emergent register
Electronic conferences as "Town meetings"
Changing contexts within a conference
Some purposes behind repetition in electronic discourse
3:// Entering the conferences: Challenges of time and space
Electronic writing: The "early" period
The subject of the conferences: What students brought as "given"
Setting and participants: A closer look
Accessing the conference: The challenge of spaces
Space and time in the arrangement of conference texts
The impact of realigned times and settings on monitor screens
The challenge of expectations about genre
Replies as new frames
4:// Titles: Form and function in electronic discourse
The impact of conference topography
Conventions of direct address in titles
Titles as suggestive of self-disclosure
The titling game and its impact
Managing community: Software and moderator impact
5:// Defining the territory
Individual views of the territory
Guarding the territory
Syntactic cues: Personal pronouns
It behaves differently
Genderin the territory
Brent's territorial moves
6:// Taking a stance: Text, self, and other
Aspects of modality
Modality: A range of definitions
The individual and the text
Verb classes
Contexts and modal verbs
A change in audience
7:// Aspects of emulation
Popularity and rhythm
Moving to reflexive writing
Emulation across distance and space in the Transparent Conference
Adjacency-pairs in the Transparent Conference
Frame and focus in Topic 2
Some features of audience in the Transparent Conference
Flocking behaviors in mainframe conferences
8:// Emulating a strategy: The rhetorical question
Features of rhetorical questions
Rhetorical questions from the Stand-Alone Conference
Rhetorical questions in the Transparent Conference
9://Conclusion
Going across local boundaries
Reading the text after the conference
A notion of virtual community
A final comment
Appendices
References
Index