wickedqueen.net

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.

So as it turns out, I did not have a strained muscle, or even plantar fasciitis, which was the suggestion of my colleague who was trained as a physical therapist.

I had a blood clot.

The doctor at UHS didn’t like the look of things when she examined my calf, so she referred me to the UW Hospital heart & vascular clinic (I got to go in a taxi on UHS’s dime), where they did an ultrasound of my legs and found a clot, so they called my UHS doctor, who had them wheel me over to the UW Hospital emergency room, where I actually didn’t have to wait too long to get in, although I was lying around for some time after being examined there.* They showed me how to inject myself, and I gave myself an injection of an anticoagulant that I will have to use for a few days while my blood gets saturated with warfarin.

When I first got into the emergency room, I called my friend Anne, who emailed her husband Nathan, who works in hospital admissions and got someone else to cover for him in order to trot over to the ER and hold my stuff and keep me company while I was waiting to be seen. He got the brunt of my emotional reaction, since you kind of have to keep these things in check over the phone, if you want to be understood.**

Anne and Nathan also took me by Walgreens to get my prescriptions filled and buy myself several pairs of “I Could Have Died” sweater socks, and now I am home and have ordered a pizza. I have not had pizza since I went on Weight Watchers. I’ve had a hard day.

The really weird part of this whole thing is that I have NO RISK FACTORS. There’s no family history. I’m young, I’m active, I have never smoked, and my birth control doesn’t even have estrogen in it! I suppose it makes sense if you’re going by the universe’s sense of dramaturgy. What better time for me to have a blood clot, really.

The part that made me take a step back and consider it all from an academic standpoint:

Lab Tech (finishing ultrasound): So, do you know where you’re going? Are you to going back to the clinic or somewhere else? I’m going to order a wheelchair…”
Me: Uh… I don’t know where I’m going. Why are you ordering a wheelchair?
Lab Tech: Well, you’re not supposed to walk with a blood clot.
Me: Ah… so I do have a blood clot, then?
Lab Tech: Yeah.
Me: (bursts into hysterical tears, attempts to explain to lab tech that I’ve just been under a lot of stress recently)***

My advisor did a whole book on news delivery (particularly in the medical setting), you know. I give this one poor marks in my retrospective account.

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*The clot was low, so there wasn’t much immediate danger of it slamming into my lungs or anything.

***Good thing I wrote that 15-page paper yesterday.

Studied at the office until 11:30 tonight. On the walk home, a pair of girls walking past me down State delivered a tag team compliment (I am C because C stands for “Cabell”):

A: I love your hair!
C: ((smile voice)) Thank you.
B: ((stacatto)) What a pretty color!
C: ((smile voice)) Thanks.

They were sort of filing by me through this interchange. The two-speaker compliment + compliment expansion. I wonder if there’s research.

When I turned down Johnson, a guy who was walking the other way on the sidewalk got about ten feet away from me and circled widely, almost into the street, as he passed. Either he was trying to display “not a threat on this not particularly well-lit street” or he was terrified of me. I WAS wearing my red leather motorcycle jacket.*

My father confirms that while he believes that in general people feel licensed to talk to strangers who are out in public with a small child, when I was a small child, with my mutant hair, “people used to come up and ask peculiar things about it.” I am waiting to hear some examples.**

By the way,*** if you’re reading this blog from the LiveJournal feed, you should know that I don’t get comment notifications if you comment on the feed account instead of on wickedqueen.net itself. And if you commented that way on an entry prior to the last three, they’re no longer listed on the feed’s page, so I can’t get to them on LJ to see if anyone commented. (I don’t know why they’re not there, the LJ feed has been up since my second entry or so.)

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*It clashes with my hair, but maybe it’s not so noticeable on a not particularly well-lit street at almost midnight.

***See, topic change not explicitly projected by preceding talk.

I redyed my hair a couple of days ago; for possibly the first time ever, I actually redyed it the same color that it had previously been. And I didn’t even redye it because the color had faded badly; it was just that I hadn’t bleached before my last dye job and consequently had, like, inch-long roots.

The color is Special Effects Cherry Bomb, which comes out a bright deep neon red, and fades to hot pink. The hot pink was still plenty vibrant two months after dying, but like I said, I had roots.

When you have brightly colored anime character hair, the world is a different place. It provides a warrant for total strangers to talk to you; some of them might be the kind of people who talk to strangers anyway (”Do you have the time,” “Do you have any spare change,” etc.), but as my friend Keely remarked to me once at a gas station after a woman had shrieked in delight over my hair from across the parking lot, I get a lot of attention.

What’s interesting is the way in which people seem to take the warrant for granted. Last week at the gym, before I redyed, I was leaving the cardio room behind a very attractive girl wearing short-shorts with “BEACH BUM” emblazoned across the ass. I was thinking, I have to admit, uncharitable thoughts about her, even a little bit after she held the door for me, but then as I was pausing to stretch my calves against the wall, she turned and said: “I love your hair, by the way.”

I said thank you and felt bad about thinking uncharitable things about the kind of person who wears BEACH BUM short shorts. Probably you shouldn’t judge people by what they wear to the gym, although my personal work-out attire is pretty indicative of my overall self-presentation and did in fact lead to me last week in the weight room hanging upside down on one of the benches to do sit-ups and and suddenly hearing from behind/above me, “CHRIST, woman, do you own ANYTHING that isn’t garish?” It was one of the guys from my program, who ought to know the answer to that question by now.

Anyway, back to the BEACH BUM girl: the interesting bit here is the “by the way,” which may have struck you as somehow unusual or weird in the context of the stranger’s compliment, delivered as it was apropos of nothing other than a subvocalized “thank you” from me after she held the door.

Phrases like “by the way” are typically employed to mark a topic or utterance as unconnected to sequentially antecedent talk (Heritage 1984), of which we hadn’t had any–talking about my hair, on the surface, hardly seems like an “abrupt shift” in topic when we weren’t talking about anything else to begin with. Strangers in public places frequently compliment my hair. In fact, I can refer to two cases right now that both occurred today, following the redying (it is pretty dramatic, I’ll post a photo when I get home):

1. In the locker room, I returned to my locker from the showers and there was another woman in my row, middle-aged, putting on her work-out clothes. As I stood there unlocking my locker, completely naked,* she asked in an enthusiastic tone, “How often do you have to dye your hair to keep it that red?”

   I allowed as how it was recently redyed, but that it would fade to a still vibrant pink, and we proceeded to have a conversation about hair dying as I dressed–she wanted her stylist to put in purple streaks, but the stylist refused on the grounds that it wouldn’t hold, and I confirmed that purple and blue are really the hardest colors to dye and you never know how they’re going to fade.

2. On my walk home from the gym, I was on the phone with my friend Crystal, reporting excitedly on recent weight loss. As I was walking and talking, a young woman walking in the other direction stopped, exclaimed over my hair, and directly asked me where I got the dye and what kind. Crystal was laughing over the whole exchange on her end, but it was interesting that the woman oriented towards the topic of my hair and the dye (for her potential use, as she presented it) as urgent enough that the phone conversation in progress could be interrupted for it (assuming she saw I was on the phone and didn’t just assume I was one of those sidewalk crazies).

In neither of these cases did the speakers produce any suggestion that the topic of talk was somehow accountable, i.e. in need of explanation, despite the fact that they both spoke to me at times when ANY initiation of talk might be accountable, i.e. a) when recipient is naked and b) when recipient is already engaged in conversation.

There WAS a case on the day that I redyed, when I was walking up State after buying some vitamin repair serum (the bleach really did a number on my hair), when a middle-aged woman walking with one or two people who seemed to be “in her party” called to me, “I love your hair!” and when I thanked her, responded with, “I really do!”

This sincerity upgrade struck me as sort of odd given that I had already produced an appreciation token accepting her compliment (cf. Pomerantz 1978), which seems to implicitly accept the underlying proposal that it was sincere, unless I unwittingly delivered my reply with some kind of sarcastic intonation.** However, again, the introduction of the topic itself was not treated as an accountable action. In general, one assumes, there is a presumption that a person with Cherry Bomb hair has put herself out, and her hair in particular, to be talked about. The act of having Cherry Bomb hair is itself an inherent mentionable.

Imagine, I suppose, if you had “normal” hair, and a stranger on the street called out to you, “I love your hair!” It would seem odd. You might wonder what they loved about it. Conversely, although I have a pretty kicky little style going on right now, I never consider this to be the referent of the compliment when people say, “I love your hair!” And if they say, “What a great color!” I don’t think they’re talking about my shirt. So in a way, they’re right; the topic is immediately clear to me when introduced by strangers. My hair IS a mentionable.

Obviously, if I really minded, I wouldn’t have dyed it Cherry Bomb (or Party Time Pink, or Atomic Turquoise, or Ultra Violet, or Electric Blue, or Hot Rod Red, etc.). The BEACH BUM’s vaguely apologetic/explanatory “by the way” struck me as odd precisely because no one else ever seems to address the topicality of my hair as accountable, and I myself don’t think of it as particularly accountable when people compliment it.***

Maybe she was just an exceptionally polite person. Definitely an outlier in the set of “strangers complimenting my hair,” but as you can see, members do not make sense of their worlds by statistical calculation (Heritage 1984); we work at it until we have an account, like exceptional politeness. Works for me, anyway.

An additional note: the politeness account only works because the utterance accounted for through “by the way” is itself complimentary. One assumes that many people do not like my hair, but they rarely say so, and if they do it is indirect (see footnote ***). I don’t know if people often remarked on my hair when I was a small child and it was noticeably weird (I have mutant hair), but I bet that if they did, there was a lot more accounting going on.

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*This should not be taken as a criticism of people who talk to naked people in places where it is perfectly reasonable that people should be naked, like locker rooms. In fact, I wish more people would act comfortable about nudity in those settings; it makes ME uncomfortable when everyone around me seems to be performing complex gyrations under their towels lest god forbid someone see their breasts, while I would be perfectly happy to prance around without bothering to wrap my towel around me or anything. I feel like I am violating norms.

***I do, on the other hand, consider bald formulations of the state of my hair, i.e. “Your hair is pink,” to be accountable. Since I and any other competent member know damn well that my hair is pink, I have to assume that something is being done that is not an informing, because obviously I already know, and is not a compliment, because if it were they’d just come out and say so, and thus my instinct is to attribute hostile motives to the speaker.

In “Sequences and Conversational Openings” (Schegloff 1968), there’s an interesting description of small children’s use of phrases like “You know what, Mummy?” as a kind of summons that confers conversational rights to a party whose rights would otherwise be limited, i.e. a child speaking to an adult. Schegloff credits Sacks (1972) for the point; Kitzinger references him on the same issue in “Doing Feminist Conversation Analysis” (2000).*

The point is, when a kid says “You know what?” and the targeted adult says “What?”, the kid has just been granted conversational carte blanche, basically. The adult has not only answered the summons, indicating availability for further interaction, but she’s produced her answer as an open-ended question, to which pretty much anything could be the answer. Questions in general make answers relevant, and if you don’t answer a question the answer you didn’t give is noticeably absent; a child asked a question by an adult is somewhat obligated to answer. And while summonses in general precede further interaction (it’s very annoying when someone says “Cabell?” and I say “What?” and then there’s silence), “What?” is so general that the kid can then say anything. And is probably going to.

A blog entry is kind of like a summons, although if it is a summons, then in a way it’s a summons that contains in itself further content. I post this entry and you either show up and see a new title/date or perhaps you’ve got me on RSS feed and… something happens, I don’t know what. I’m new to this blogging thing. Did I mention that I used to code in Notepad? Anyway, there you are, summoned by the mere fact of me speaking, but then again that’s basically how a summons works anyway. It’s a speech act. Except that I’m not speaking, I’m typing, and there might be some temporal lag. But it still works!

And then you get here, metaphorically going, “What?”, and I have license to say whatever I damn well please, because you asked. Metaphorically.

As noted by Kitzinger, Sacks describes that type of summons as a way for children to gain speakership rights that might otherwise be unavailable in the child/adult interaction, and thus is a demonstration of how a particular speech/interaction pattern displays inequality (the parent, of course, may answer the summons with a deferral/rejection like “Not now, Mummy’s busy”). So do bloggers lack power, or in some way perceive themselves as lacking speech rights? Maybe I just feel like more people should be listening to me more often.

My evil ex-girlfriend once told a third party that my online journal was boring because I’d devoted a large section of an entry to my hunt for socks in Tokyo.** Personally, I think she was jealous because she didn’t get to go to Tokyo, and also probably wanted to see some bewailing of her loss or something, and anyway, the summons was somewhat specifically not for her. But you can’t direct the blogger summons, really. It’s not like calling for Mummy. The blogger summons is more like me at age five, shouting off-screen in a home video that had turned its focus to my sister, “Look at me! LOOK AT ME! I’M GOING TO DO A TRICK!”

But people have to know you’re there. The funny thing is that you can summon people you don’t know about at all, as long as they can find YOU. (And if they can find you, you can’t stop from summoning them. No blogging exorcisms for the evil ex-girlfriend.) On a related note, Jeremy has enjoyed some success with an “all points bloggertin.” Unfortunately, most of my secondary school crushes had extremely generic names.

Next time: more on differences between interfaces and virtual spaces, and why all those blogspot types look down their noses at LiveJournal.

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*I am studying for my prelim, and furthermore, this is my blog. I will cite CA papers if I please.

**It wasn’t easy, dude. I had giant foreign feet. Well, I still have them, but they’re neither foreign nor particularly giant here.