Virtual Speakers, Virtual Audiences: Agency, Audience and Constraint in an Online Chat Community

Abstract

A participant-observer approach was used to explore an online chat community. The chat room was defined in terms of its construction and maintenance of speaker identities, and the user-chat room interface was examined with the aim of exploring how notions of selfhood can be better understood. Chat room audiences were then discussed within the framework of delineating different levels of virtual audiences and outlining processes by which these different levels interact. Finally, formal and informal discursive constraints were explored, and conclusions drawn on the ways that chat room users deal with constraints on their chat activity. Implications for understanding internet communication as well as discourse in general are discussed.

The Dynamics of Motherhood Performance: Hong Kong's Middle Class Working Mothers On- and Off-Line

“…In other words, Happy Land is far from an inferior second to 'real' face-to-face relationships. In contrast to Zhao (2005) and Islam (2006), who both argued that in chatroom situations users tend to start chatting in a large group and then split into smaller groups and eventually develop into private dyadic conversations. In Happy Land, users seem to value the 'comfort' of chatting in large groups -there are four different 'rooms' available for chat, but only one is ever used.…”

“…Internet chat is a necessarily performative form of narrative discourse and narratives are important elements in how the self and relations with others are constituted (Lawler 2000: 12-13). Islam (2006), paraphrasing Clifford Geertz, describes the chatroom as 'a metasocial commentary … a story they tell themselves about themselves [which] can be seen as a reproduction of the collective life of the group, a self-enacted story with its users as narrators' (Islam 2006: 82). Several features of Internet chat differentiate it from conventional social interactions.…”

“…Chatroom discourse follows rules which are similar to those governing face-to-face communication (Islam 2006). The nature of the website, the setup and structure of the chatroom, and the identity and relationship amongst users explain why Happy Land chat revolves primarily around users' presentation of themselves as mothers.…”

Backstage Discourse and the Emergence of Organizational Voices: Exploring Graffiti and Organization

“…In this sense, public discourse was possible even in a private space. With the recently popular study of anonymous discursive media such as blogs and chat rooms (e.g., Islam, 2007), perhaps future studies might apply or modify this typology for other similar spaces, real or virtual. Because the propensity of the texts to promote discourse varied by the type and content of the texts, future research might attempt to elaborate when and how certain kinds of texts demand response.…”

Foods of association: biocultural perspectives on foods and beverages that mediate sociability

“…Since the mid-1900s, social network analysis has been systematically applied by social scientists to communities on all scales, and most recently to Internet sites. Further, some of those electronic interactions eventuate in what are more conventionally regarded to be social associations, such as announcements that convene membership groups, identify in-person educational opportunities, or connect individuals in geographic propinquity for in-person interactions and other face-to-face or same-place meetings (Wilson and Peterson 2002;Islam 2006;Knorr 2006).…”