You can’t step in the same river twice, and 1992 internet and 2007 internet are more like a creek and an ocean.
This semester I will be blogging weekly for my course on collaborative learning, because it is a requirement; I will be doing it here rather than on the course site because a) I have enough blogs to maintain already and b) there’s a precedent, if you’ll recall my many prelim-studying entries and those times I geeked out over the stuff we saw in Alice’s digital media literacy class; besides c) my audience is hella nerdy anyway.
I was surprised to find that the first week’s readings actually referenced conversation analysis (CA) quite a bit. Back when I was studying for my prelim on the subject, I read several chapters from an anthology on CA and cognition, so it’s not that I don’t think it’s appropriate for the subject under study, but it’s always interesting to see what people who were not actually trained in CA make of it. Usually something that would make the hardcore CA people cry, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, given the focus of the course and thus the readings on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in the service of collaborative learning, and particularly text-based quasi-synchronous CMC (e.g. chat), the data seem well-fitted to CA. If your concern as an analyst is that you have access to all resources that were available to participants at the time of interaction, chat logs are pretty comprehensive, especially if they’re time-stamped.
In some cases, though, lack of unique adequacy raised issues for me; “‘[u]nique adequacy’ is defined here as the researcher’s ability to analyse the encountered social world from practitioner research rather than from ‘classical social theorising’ (Cuff et al., 1992) perspectives” (Wakefield 2000). Stahl (2006) seems to suggest more difficulty with tracking parallel topics in chat than I believe most participants actually have, especially if they’ve been using chat for their own personal purposes for any length of time. The book was published in 2006, but I’m not entirely sure when the research he references using CMC for group work on math problems was conducted–certainly a major issue in research on the internet in any context is that today’s internet is a dramatically different place from the internet of even five years ago, and the average participant gets more and more savvy with the passing of time.
On the other hand, technologies and applications also change very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much the only people MUDding now are the same people who were MUDding in 1992 when it was an exciting topic for academic research. MMOGs are certainly the virtual descendants of MUDs, but they’re not quite the same and they are occupied by mostly different people. Email lists, while not dead, definitely seem to me to be on the way out, although perhaps not in academia as in the general population–my main exposure to email lists outside of academia was in activism and fandom. I wanted to talk about sexuality and read Star Trek pornography, and for some time, those needs were mainly met by Usenet and listservs.
Now, however, there are websites, particularly hive communities like LiveJournal, and communities on Facebook. Almost all the undergraduates who I interviewed last semester about Facebook use remarked at some point or another that email was “formal” and not something they used for socialization or personal communication. This is probably not going to stop academics, because we are the kind of people who like spreadsheets and monographs and Being Important, but for everyone else, email seems to have become sort of stuffy and boring, like actual mail or something.
Even chat, which is to me so familiar that I tend not to distinguish in vernacular reports whether I was talking to someone face-to-face or virtually, may be on its way to obsolescence even as I type. Text messaging on mobile devices seems a bit different in character than chat, and now that everyone has a cell phone and everyone is also online, I think there are fewer extended interactions happening in chat, even if people do leave their AIM up as a kind of answering service, competing to have the deepest or wittiest away message in the dorm. Or, you know, I’ve always been weird; maybe it was always more random solicitations for cybersex than anything else. It’s not like my college chats were deep, but they were properly punctuated.
Really, I just wonder how long it will be before computer voice chat largely supplants text chat. Gamers already prefer it; they use third party applications to supplement the game interfaces that supply only text chat because it’s so clunky, especially when you’re trying to coordinate raids. I use Skype when I play City of Heroes, and I’ve also started using it to call my parents because my cell phone service is so shitty in my new place. As everyone’s systems catch up, I can easily see more and more people using voice chat in place of the phone, but also in place of “impersonal” text. Voice may kill the chat star. Maybe. On the other hand, there are advantages to not being totally present for the people to whom you’re talking, and sometimes I don’t want to devote that much attention.
Once again, I have to say simply that all I know about the internet in five years is that I probably can’t imagine it. Sure, I want that headjack as much as ever, but even if I get it, there’s no telling what comes with it. It makes it hard to keep your research current.
September 16th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I usually hate it when websites try to turn the internet into television or radio — media where I’m forced to consume information linearly, at the speed they choose, rather than being able to read quickly and asynchronously and with copious cross-referencing. But voice chat supplanting text might be interesting. The mail -> email -> IM -> SMS path has been a continuous trend towards short, abrupt, and informationally impoverished writing. The strengths of writing are structure and complexity, and so the process of making it more and more like speech has made it suckier and suckier as writing. Moving to voice would continue the trend towards immediacy, but open up a whole universe of richness and nuanced communication that we’ve been missing.
On another note, many of my IM conversations are more like sitting in the same room as someone else, while we both do our own work and occasionally say something. I’ve rarely had that kind of conversation on the phone, which is more attention-consuming. It would be interesting if voice chat eventually became atmospheric enough that it was more like telepresence.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I wonder what will befall the chat room. My own research points to a role of chat rooms - a destigmatized supportive environment that requires a degree of anonymity to function for the participants - that voice could not supplement. Still, the falling popularity of full fledged AOL service and the death of other kinds of chat rooms leads one to an initial hypothesis that chat rooms are no longer a major draw to the internet. They do get boring. But some still do draw an active community. Hmm… see now, if the internet was my primary topic of study and not just a side topic that I must address because a huge part of Autistic Culture is virtual…
Personally I think that online communication can’t be analyzed using traditional CA nor grounded theory approach to textual analysis. A much more pragmatic use of CA, GTA, and discourse theory must be employed. I say this because useful markers in conversation fall away - simultaneous speech doesn’t really signify much in the text realm as it does in regular conversation, but nor are the writings as thought out as they are in say written survey responces or essays or anything else one might use grounded theory on. And because I actively dislike both approaches, I routinely just call what I’m doing “discourse analysis” and don’t bother to cite anything methodologically
September 16th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Oh and you have an asterisk next to Wakefield, 2000, but no footnote. What the hey? I need footnotes!
September 17th, 2007 at 5:23 am
Kate: I don’t actually think that chat rooms will DIE, but that like MUDs, they are probably going to attract fewer and fewer new users, although they may settle out maintaining a slightly higher baseline. I don’t know.
And the footnote was something I moved into the main body and forgot to delete. Sorry!
September 17th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
LOL, you’re good. Personally I gave up MUDs and chat rooms when I realized girls in real life had real boobs that I could really maybe touch… >_
September 17th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Dammit, stupid frickin blog script doesn’t let me do my uber nerdy emoticons!
What came after my aborted attempt to make a grimace face was
“I really wanna go back to my chat room to do follow-up research, but my parent’s canceled full AOL service
“
September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am
(I hope you don’t mind my commenting, not being a classmate…)
Several things you said struck me as true, but particularly what you said about listservs. I am a fairly recent member of a UK archivists’ listserv (which belongs, to all intents and purposes, in an academic context - most messages are either advertising jobs, courses, or calls for conference papers).
I rather wish it were a discussion board, because in today’s context, all the messages which are irrelevant to me feel like so much more spam to trudge through, without the headers which make identifying spam easy. Whereas if it WERE a discussion board, I would be able to choose when to go there; the irrelevant entries wouldn’t be sent to me personally, and I’d simply not open that topic (whereas it seems negligent not to read one’s mail). It’s the lack of a filter which is annoying. Also, now that one can leave messages on people’s Facebooks etc, e-mail seems like more of a significant gesture: I would comment on someone’s blog/wall with much less premeditation than I would send them an e-mail - or a letter, indeed.
I don’t mind LJ notification e-mails in the same way because they’re always responses to a “conversation” I’ve started or participated in, so a basic level of interest seems to be guaranteed. My husband, however, uses LJ only as a means of access to a couple of communities, for which he’s chosen to be notified of every new entry - and he seems to react to that as he would to a listserv (that is, occasional irritation with irrelevant entries.)
The only other listserv to which I have ever belonged was, yeah, a fandom one. But that was back in the mid-nineties and I unsubscribed because back then I didn’t check my e-mail regularly enough to be able to keep up (and that’s a strange thought…)
It’s true that e-mail now feels “formal” - I have written more paper letters to friends lately than I have e-mails.
I’ve never much used chat, but I prefer text communication to speech for much the same reasons as Michael - both as a consumer of information and a participant in conversation. I can type faster than I talk, which gives me time to proofread - this may mean the conversation is less spontaneous, but that’s not always a bad thing: I like the time to consider. (Mind you, I have mild Asperger’s syndrome and hate to use the telephone in real life, so I’m probably not representative.)
I wonder if anyone’s compared text-message culture across the Atlantic? Almost everyone I know in the UK sends many more texts than they make phonecalls, because the billing system has always been set up so that text is very cheap compared to calling. And a text can be picked up at any time; it doesn’t require the instant attention of the recipient, and so seems less presumptuous. And the recipient doesn’t have to reply on the spot…
The major disadvantage of real-time internet activities for me is that everyone I want to talk to is in a different time zone. I have tried Scrabulous with Travis lately, and it’s been taking us weeks to complete a single game because we’re rarely online simultaneously.
(OK, I’ll shut up now… but this is a really interesting topic.)
September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 am
OK, I’m kind of horrified that that got so long. It didn’t look that bad in the box.
September 28th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Sharon (the professor requiring the Ed Psych blog) was here and found this discussion and various topics encountered (CA, interdisciplinarity, the future of chat) to be extremely interesting and rather than leaving a long comment here will send you to my own blog about this, which I will now go and write with some inspiration. I did comment in David’s (also in my course) blog with some grumps about the primitive instructional tools that are available through institutional support structures to students and professors, not all of whom come into courses with blog sites such as these. So you set students up with what you have, which for this course is Moodle.
David’s blog (also not in Moodle) asked if there were knowledge and information on facilitating text chat for educational purposes and I replied that I had a dining room table full of books [sic] on the subject but that none of them applied because the technology standards for industry and for industrial-strength for-profit education (which is ususally kind of lousy in my experience) have ALREADY supplanted text chat. But these new technologies are not much available to teachers or even professors in #1 departments of ed psych within #5 (or whatever) Schools of Education in the US, which can’t even keep their elevators running. Industry-standard tools come with industrial strentgh prices that entire institutions, much less individual teachers and professors, can ill afford. I have occasionally experienced the light through support of a federal grant, but the tools disappear when the grant expires and one is back to baseline level, which in the education business is pretty base. Text it is.
Hey, Cabell: Please put a link to this blog in the course blog space in Moodle, so people will come here. Thanks!