Phonological strategies

Numerals are frequently used for their sound value, as in 2 for ‘to/too,’ 4 for ‘for’ (and B4 for ‘before’), d8 for ‘date,’ or l8r for ‘later.’ This is a widespread practice in other languages as well. In French, for instance, 2 Ri1 is used for ‘de rien,’ and vi1 7aprem for ‘viens cet après-m[idi].’ In Italian, the numeral 6 is used to represent the second person singular form of essere (tu sei), and 16 (seidici) is used to approximate the expression se dici (‘if you say’). In Korean, 8 is pronounced ‘pal’ and 2 is pronounced ‘ee,’ so the commonly used 8282 is read as ‘palee palee,’ which means ‘hurry, hurry.’ Similarly, 1004 is pronounced ‘cheonsa,’ which means ‘angel’ in Korean (hence the name of a Korean popular song “Be my 1004”).

Sometimes the phonological strategy is complexified by invoking a phonological system of another language. In Japanese, for example, 39 is pronounced ‘sankyuu’ which is meant to sound like English ‘thank you.’ Similarly, the Chinese have 3Q (san Q, read more or less as sankyu). What is interesting about 39 and 3Q is that they are not purely Japanese or Chinese, but hybrid Japanese- and Chinese-inflected English forms that both rely on a stereotyped East Asian pronunciation that replaces the [θ] (‘th’ sound) with [s].Footnote ⁶

The Chinese have been particularly expansive in their use of numerals. Writing on a computer in Chinese normally involves typing either a radical or a pinyin (roman alphabet phonetic) version, and then selecting the appropriate character from a drop-down table. Because this takes time, Chinese chatters commonly use numerals to signify roughly similar sounding words (or a least a similar leading consonant) to maintain a brisk pace of communication. For example, 282 [èr bā èr] is commonly used to represent 饿不饿 [è bù è] ‘are you hungry?’. One could reply by writing 246 [èr sì liù], used to approximate [è sǐ le] 饿死了 ‘starving to death’ and then sign off with 88 [bā bā], sounding like ‘bye bye’.Footnote ⁷ While people don't actually produce whole exchanges written purely in numerals like this, what is striking is the extent to which the technology-induced use of numerals has become part of youth culture. Chinese blogs show that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of numerical transliterations of Chinese expressions like these. And now they have migrated from the computer to other realms of cultural life. For instance, Mavis Fan, a Taiwanese pop star, put numerical textings to music in her 2001 hit song “Digital Love.” Hotels and restaurants make up special deals for Valentines Day with coded numerical phrases, and some jokes make use of homophonic numbers.Footnote ⁸ Change the language, of course, and the meaning changes dramatically. In Thai, for example, the number 5 is pronounced ‘ha,’ and so 555 is used for ‘hahaha.’ But in Chinese, 5 is pronounced wu and 555 simulates crying.

Graphic strategies

As we saw earlier in the cases of Greeklish and ASCII-ized Arabic, numerals can also sometimes be used for their graphic resemblance to letters, as in 8 for θ and 3 for ξ in Greek, and 3 for Arabic ع and 7 for Arabic ح.Footnote ⁹ Other strategies include graphic reductions and leet speak.

Graphic reductions involve initialisms (such as TTYL for Talk to You Later, OMG for Oh My God, or LOL for Laughing Out Loud), in which letters are pronounced individually; acronyms, which are pronounced as words (such as ROTFL, rolling on the floor laughing, or BRB, be right back, pronounced ‘rotful’ and ‘berb’ respectively); and abbreviations (such as thx for thanks, coo for cool, sup for what's up?).

Mathematical symbols are frequently added as well. For example, in French, the plus sign (+) is often used for plus (‘more’), as in the advertising slogan of BNP Paribas: TA + K ENTRER (Tu n'as plus qu’à entrer – You need only come in). It is perhaps most widely used in the leave-taking expression A+, a truncated form of à plus tard (‘until later’), frequently used at the end of an email, just prior to signing one's name. In Italian, the addition sign (+) is similarly used for più (more), while the multiplication sign (x) is used for per (meaning ‘for’ or ‘by’). To further complicate matters, x is sometimes combined with letters to form novel word forms, such as xò for però (‘nevertheless’) or xké for perché (‘why’/‘because’).Footnote ¹⁰

The Chinese increasingly incorporate pinyin (roman script) into their online writing, and sometimes abbreviate pinyin spellings. For example, zhengfu, the word for government, is often shortened to ZF. Some abbreviations refer to English rather than Chinese, such as PK for videogame ‘player killing,’ PS for Photoshop, and ML for making love (Tatlow, Reference Tatlow2012).

To the extent that users don't know what specific words a graphically reduced form stands for, it becomes functionally an ideogram. For example, many non-English websites use FAQ as a heading (often pronounced as a word [fɑk]), even though ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ is not part of their language. In the French-speaking world, FAQ has been reassigned to the expression ‘Foire Aux Questions’ to avoid giving the English language credit for the acronym, but it is important to note that the existing acronym drove the choice of words, and not vice versa.

Sometimes an abbreviation does not look like one. In French, for example, t'inquiètes is often used instead of ne t'inquiète pas in text messages. Because the negation is completely absent, someone who did not know the convention (a language learner, for example) might well interpret it as ‘be worried’ rather than ‘don't worry about it.’

Graphic reductions such as IRL (in real life), ROTFL, TTYL, or LOL, even if they are used outside of digital environments, inevitably evoke the domain of electronically mediated communication and virtual worlds when they are used, whereas reduced forms that did not develop online, such as FYI, AIDS, TGIF, CIA, IOU do not. The fact that they are bundled in their own succinct package is evidence of their widespread use – one cannot make a reduced form of something that is not already familiar to at least some members of one's social network. If I write YCMAIOT it will remain forever opaque and useless, since there is no functional need for the expression ‘you cannot make an initialism of this.’ However, if you write me an email that incorporates ycmaiot, at that point it becomes a socially shared resource, an Available Design, whose very use identifies you and me as being ‘in’ on a special meaning that those who haven't read this book will not share, and that therefore gives us an in-group status.

Although today graphic reductions are often associated with texting and other forms of online writing, it is important to remember that the phenomenon is a widespread and ancient one, often born of material limitations but then perpetuated by social convention. In ancient Egypt, for example, abbreviations became common when a rush pen was used to write cursive hieroglyphic on papyrus, because a rush pen could not easily draw strokes from right to left, and consequently only the left half of some signs was written (Parkinson & Quirke, Reference Parkinson and Quirke1995, p. 32). In medieval manuscripts, the use of abbreviations and symbols was common because parchment was expensive. But even when paper and the printing press reduced material and labor costs, abbreviations were preserved, since early printers wished to imitate manuscripts as closely as possible.

Reading and writing non-standard forms

The phonological and graphic strategies described above may or may not save keystrokes. But they rarely, if ever, make reading easier, especially when both phonological and graphic strategies are combined. When writers use multiple encoding strategies, their readers need to use multiple decoding strategies. Let's return to the exchange that opened this chapter:

A's encoding of “what's up?” uses two strategies. First, it tries to capture the phonetic characteristics of casual speech, with a deleted /t/ and an ensuing assimilation that voices the /s/, turning it into [z]. We as readers need to think not only in terms of English speech, but also more specifically in terms of a particular speech variety of the hip-hop generation. When we encounter the caret character we need to switch from a phonological strategy to a graphic strategy to interpret the caret as an upward pointing arrow, and subsequently make the association between this symbol and the word up. There is no question mark, so we must infer that this is a question from our prior familiarity with the expression “what's up?” B's response (nmhu?) also mixes strategies. The first three letters are an initialism representing the first letters of the written words ‘not much, how about’ (or possibly ‘not much here’), but the u is a rebus, phonologically representing the whole word ‘you.’ Again, we must switch processing conventions mid-stream from graphic to phonological in order to correctly parse the utterance. This need to switch processing strategies makes reading difficult initially, especially because the strategy switching points are never marked but must be discovered by trial and error. Of course, if we encounter utterances such as nmhu on a recurring basis, we will develop automaticity and will instantaneously recognize the whole unit, as a unit, without added cognitive load.

‘Leet speak,’ which we encountered in Chapter 4, involves the use of non-alphabetic characters to substitute for alphabetic letters in writing. Although leet chiefly employs a graphic strategy (e.g., 1337 is a common respelling of leet), it sometimes adds a phonological layer of recoding, using non-standard spellings (e.g., r00l for ‘rule’) or incorporates common typing mistakes, such as in teh for ‘the,’ and nad for ‘and,’ which might be rendered as 73# and |\|4|) respectively (N. Ross, Reference Ross2006). This obviously requires users’ prior familiarity with common typographical errors, but also – and significantly – the ability to deal with subsequent transformations of already transformed forms.Footnote ¹¹

The process of writing and reading non-standard forms in online discourse is somewhat like what linguistics students have to go through when they first learn to use the International Phonetic Alphabet. But phonetic transcription has a clear analytic purpose. In the case of online interpersonal communication, why add work? One reason is that symbolic transformation is creatively satisfying fun that can be shared with others, and the complicity that comes with mutually understanding ‘coded’ forms can reinforce personal bonds and reaffirm social affiliations within particular communities of practice.

Emoticons

As discussed in Chapter 1, emoticons are pictographs that add a non-verbal affective dimension to online communication. Assembled from punctuation marks, they are a good example of how one set of available resources (symbols that mark syntactic boundaries) can be put to use in new configurations to serve a wholly new purpose (to inject friendliness into an interaction or to dissuade readers from taking what is written too seriously). Unlike the expression of emotion in face-to-face communication, which often happens uncontrollably or even unconsciously, a writer's use of emoticons is always conscious and sometimes contrived. That is, when someone uses an emoticon, it does not mean that the person is actually experiencing the represented emotion, but that he or she wants to evoke an aura of that feeling for some communicative effect. This remove is what allows emoticons to be used non-literally for effects such as irony and humor, as in this instant messaging example:

Here A is not literally wincing in pain (>.<), but humorously expressing her feelings of frustration with her math course. Her feigned flowing tears (T_T) in response to being called an idiot are tempered by both the sarcasm of “thanks a lot oh lovely friend of mine” and by the lol she sends as a coda in line 4.

Since the 1990s in Japan, and since about 2009 in the US and Europe, smartphones allow users to insert emoji, or full color emoticons, into their texts. Some emoji are specific to Japanese culture (a cup of sake, a bowl of ramen noodles, a white flower for brilliant homework), but many others are more broadly applicable.

Emoji go well beyond just expressing affect; they can be used as a kind of rudimentary sign language. The “Narratives in Emoji” blog offers scenarios and movie plots recounted in emoji. For example, Les Miserables is illustrated in ninety-five emoji, and Titanic is illustrated in fourteen emoji starting with a ship's anchor and ending with a broken heart.Footnote ¹³ In certain online environments, ASCII emoticons are automatically converted into emoji. For example, when I type :-) in Microsoft Word, my keystrokes are converted into ☺. Many people find these transformations annoying precisely because they are automatic (though the autocorrect feature can be overridden) and they produce an overly ‘cutesy’ look that may be ill suited to the impression the writer wants to convey.

Emoji have become a standard built-in feature in certain chatrooms and blogging environments, and often they are animated as well. Applications such as CLIPish provide full-motion animations that can be inserted into texts to express affect (Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Still from a full-motion animation expressing jubilation

Given that writing has always had its ways of expressing affect and attitude, why have emoticons and emoji developed now? No doubt, the rapid pace and truncated language of chat, instant messaging, and texting has something to do with it, for one has little time or space to elaborate on one's mental states in those environments. Emoticons are quick, easy, and synoptic. Their less frequent use in email (Randall, Reference Randall2002) suggests that when people do have the time and space to write more fully, they also have less need of emoticons.Footnote ¹⁴ However, there is also an organic, cultural dimension to the arrival of emoticons. On computers and smartphones, where icons are the dominant organizational and navigational devices, where images increasingly compete with and complement words, and where one person's creative moment can quickly go viral, the emoticon is a logically consistent outgrowth that is superficially emblematic of the digital ethos. ‘Superficially’ is precisely why the use of emoticons varies so much from individual to individual: some computer novices wanting to fit in will use emoticons as digital membership badges. Some more experienced digiterati eschew emoticons because they see them as silly and devoid of any real meaning. Most people are probably in between, willing to use an occasional emoticon for a touch of humor, but essentially indifferent to them. In any event, emoticons are for now a fixture in the online landscape and, as we will see in the next section, people have developed nuanced conventions by which to interpret them.

LOL

LOL (laughing out loud) is one of the most widely used online initialisms, and its use has spread to many languages other than English. While it usually signals that the writer finds whatever is onscreen to be humorous, it rarely, if ever, means that the writer is literally laughing out loud as he or she is writing. Most often, in English at least, lol conveys a tone of light irony or sarcasm.Footnote ¹⁵ Despite its origin as an initialism, lol is probably more appropriately viewed as an independent lexical item for a number of reasons.

First, it is most often used in contexts in which an expansion to ‘laughing out loud’ would not be grammatically or pragmatically appropriate. For example, lol frequently appears alone on a line of its own in chat or text exchanges, and often in response to another's lol.

Second, it has developed unique semantic, morphological, and phonological features. Sometimes pronounced as L-O-L, sometimes as ‘lole,’ sometimes as ‘lall,’ lol has spawned literally hundreds of variations (e.g., lololol, loooooolll, I did it for the lulz – i.e., for the laughs) as well as internet memes such as ‘lolcats,’ in which photos or images of cats in humorous positions and circumstances are captioned in ‘lol speak,’ such as i can has t3h kibbls plz?? for ‘Can I have some food please?’Footnote ¹⁶

Third, lol is commonly used in languages other than English, where it loses its abbreviation value (i.e., no connection can be made between the letters lol and a corresponding phrase).Footnote ¹⁷ However, language-specific, phonetic representations of laughter (such as he he in English) are also used on the Internet. For instance, the Korean character ㅋ is equivalent to the hard ‘k’ sound in English and ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ (‘kekekekeke’) is used as a phonetic imitation of laughter. Koreans also use ‘ㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎ’ for ‘hahahahaha.’ In Japanese, a semantic approach is adopted, but with an iterative pattern that mimics the rhythm of laughter. WWWWW repeats the first letter of the verb warau ‘to laugh.’ In Japanese blogs, the kanji character for laughter, 笑, is often used instead of LOL or WWWWW. Again, 555 is used in Thai.

Finally, lol appears to be undergoing semantic bleaching, gradually losing its association with laughter, and becoming an element of discourse grammar, as I will speculate below.

Interpreting affective elements

How are affective elements interpreted? In one experimental study (Walther & D'Addario, Reference Walther and D'Addario2001), researchers compared sentences such as the following to assess the impact of emoticons on message interpretation:

The researchers were testing the hypothesis (among others) that a frown emoticon used in conjunction with a positive verbal message (e.g., item 2 above) would convey less positivity than a positive ‘pure message’ and less negativity than a negative ‘pure message,’ such as item 4 above. However, they found that the use of :-), ;-), or :-( emoticons made a difference in interpretation only if the verbal part of the message was positive. For example, contrary to the researchers’ predictions, item 2 was rated as ‘unhappy’ as any of the negative verbal messages (for which emoticons made no difference). The problem is that the study did not probe what exactly the writer was unhappy about. The researchers assumed that raters were assessing the writer's attitude toward the econ class. But the juxtaposition of a frown emoticon with an unambiguous statement like ‘it's a joy’ makes little sense, so subjects were most probably applying it to the more proximate second part of the prompt concerning the writer's other courses. By this reading, the frown emoticon implies that the writer's other courses are not as good as the economics class, and explains why subjects in the study rated the item so negatively.

My undergraduate students make a clear distinction between the use of ‘lol’ and a smiley :) either on a line of its own (i.e., as a complete utterance) or at the end of an utterance. For example:

The first message, with lol, suggests that the writer is teasing or being ironic. The same message with a smiley at the end is more sincere, expressing admiration, and perhaps flirtatiousness. The effect of lol is to attenuate the seriousness of whatever precedes it, so it can suggest that the writer does not really believe what he or she has written. On the other hand, lol could be concealing coyness or shyness if the writer really does think that the other person is a “stud muffin,” but is afraid of the reader taking it the wrong way, finding it “weird” (and therefore the writer makes it a joke by adding lol). Many students think that this utterance would indeed be strange without some kind of affective particle like lol or :) attached.

However, when we change the matrix sentence to a negative pragmatic polarity, people's responses are more variable, and the values of lol and :) may shift subtly. Consider, for example:

Here, some people interpret both lol and :) as face-saving hedges (i.e., “You really are a jerk, but I don't feel comfortable saying so without some attenuation”), but others see only lol as a hedge, with the emoticon :) signifying flirtiness, complicity, or attachment (i.e., “You're a real jerk, but I think it's cute.” “I'm referring to an inside joke between us”). Or even “you did something mean to a third party, and I'm happy about it.” If the speakers know each other fairly well, lol may suggest a slightly negative assessment, but not a threat to their mutual friendship (“You're a real jerk, and I can't believe I put up with it”), but :) suggests a more positive attitude (“You're a real jerk, teehee.” “And that's what I love about you”).

Is there a grammar of affective elements in electronically mediated discourse? My own informal and unscientific inquiries suggest that young people have quite clear and nuanced ideas about how to interpret affective particles and that some kind of shared, conventional ‘grammar’ may be developing, but this is a highly speculative assertion at present. What is needed is research that takes different sources of variation (e.g., age, gender, social class, language, culture, education, online experience) into account in the production and interpretation of affective elements in various contexts of electronic discourse.

Exploring a MOO

We saw an example of interaction in a French MOO in Chapter 4. Let's here consider an example of written interaction in English involving eight participants in a MOO. The excerpt is from one of my graduate seminars, during a week when our focus was on the dynamics of online interaction. Although MOOs offer many features that go beyond what is available in chat rooms, this particular example only makes use of standard chatroom features. The excerpt below, which represents my students’ first experience of a MOO, begins on what was the 66th turn in the session (the previous turns involved students logging on and getting acclimated to the environment) and is followed by 224 subsequent turns (about six pages) of continued discussion. The excerpt is almost purely language play, centered on the term MOO. The seed of a ‘serious’ theme of conceptual differences across languages is planted in turns 16–17, but it is not taken up again until turn 28 and then again right after this excerpt, at which point the interaction gains momentum and gradually develops greater content focus in the remaining turns.

1. 1. Matt_R says, “this is moo-erific!”

2. 2. Brindy_S :P

3. 3. Matt_R says, “moo-tastic”

4. 4. Matt_R says, “moolicious”

5. 5. Patti_D says, “thattaboy, Matt!!!!!”

6. 6. Paul_B says, “mooving experience”

7. 7. Matt_R says, “or maybe just moo-fy”

8. 8. Brindy_S says, “moot point”

9. 9. Patti_D says, “she moooooaned.”

10. 10. Paul_B says, “moooood altering”

11. 11. Matt_R says, “I'm just mooing around”

12. 12. Matt_R says, “go moo yourself”

13. 13. Brindy_S says, “not in the mooooood\”

14. 14. Patti_D says, “moooooooreover, we have work to do!”

15. 15. Matt_R says, “Who's wearing a moo moo”

16. 16. Patti_D says, “so, if you don't have “moo” in your language, then could you understand our current word play?”

17. 17. Patti_D says, “I mean, you could understand “word play,” but could you translate the precise word play?”

18. 18. Matt_R says, “hmm”

19. 19. Greg_S says, “are you serious?”

20. 20. Patti_D says, “would you NEED to understand “moo”?”

21. 21. Patti_D says, “yes, it's a serious question.”

22. 22. Greg_S says, “let's start with a defintion of “moo””

23. 23. Brindy_S says, “………”

24. 24. Greg_S says, “are there moos?”

25. 25. Matt_R says, “examples of conceptual differences across languages: we have moo; they don't”

26. 26. Brindy_S says, “bovine speech”

27. 27. Patti_D says, “but they DOOO, it's just called something else – onomotopoetic (sp??)”

28. 28. Rick_K says, “So what kinds of conceptual differences have you encountered in your own language learning?”

29. 29. Kathy_L says, “we say moooooooo, others might saw meeeewwwww….”

30. 30. Greg_S says, “this is udder-ly interesting”

31. 31. Brindy_S says, “meuh in French I think”

32. 32. Greg_S says, “moo-ving”

33. 33. Matt_R says, “if a moo falls in the woods and noone hears it does it make a sound?”

34. 34. Matt_R says, “what's the sound of one moo clapping?”

35. 35. Patti_D says, “OK, maybe we should moooove to more precise examples”

36. 36. Greg_S says, “is this for real?”

37. 37. Greg_S says, “I keep trying to think, but all I hear is “mooooooo””

I have chosen this particular excerpt because it represents a dramatic breaking away from the kind of discourse that students engage in when sitting around a seminar table talking face to face. Although the students were all in the same room, the fact that they were interacting through the frame of their individual computer screens completely destabilized their normal interaction patterns, removed filters of standard notions of appropriateness, and gave way to an unbridled ludic spirit among the students. I as teacher no longer had any control of the interaction, nor did my (written) voice have any more authority than that of any other participant – witness how my attempt to corral the discussion in line 28 goes completely unheeded. Wit is the top priority in this excerpt, and there is a traceable development in the humor. The first examples (moo-erific, moo-tastic, moolicious) are somewhat forced, using moo to replace unrelated syllables. This sets the stage for a series of phonologically based examples that play on the /mu/ sound shared in the source word: mooving experience, moot point, moooood altering. Matt_R then experiments with keeping just the /u/ sound in common with the source word (moo-fy– [g]oofy; mooing around – [scr]ewing around). He then tries a further modification, dropping the -ing in mooing (go moo yourself) and gets the satisfaction of an immediate clever response from Brindy_S in line 13 that plays not only on the sound but also on the sexual tenor of Matt's imperative (not in the mooooood).

Several of the witticisms take a different tack, some relying on graphic, not phonological, play (e.g., Patti_D's moooooaned and moooooooreover in lines 9 and 14), others playing on semantic puns (udder-ly interesting), others based on philosophical riddles (if a moo falls in the woods…, the sound of one moo clapping, lines 33–34), and others simply making clever ripostes (e.g., in response to Greg's call for a definition of ‘moo,’ Brindy replies “bovine speech,” lines 22, 26).

Turn 35 begins a shift toward a more serious focus, and marks the transition effectively by being serious in intent, but at the same time incorporating humor in its form (OK, maybe we should moooove to more precise examples). Following this excerpt, examples of language play are sparse in the remaining 224 turns, but they do not disappear completely, with occasional remarks such as That's moooos to me, following a serious comment by a fellow student.

On the surface of things, it appears that this kind of synchronous online interaction is like speech written down. Turns are short, reminiscent of spoken banter, necessarily punctual to maintain the rhythm and pace of interaction in real time. Some turns directly mimic oral utterances (thattaboy, Matt!!!!!) and other imitate spoken stress patterns through the use of ‘upper case voice’ (but they DOOO… which cleverly plays simultaneously on the ‘moo’ theme). There are analogues to non-verbal turns in conversation (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, shrugs, etc. that serve as a communicative turn) such as the sticking out of the tongue emoticon in line 2, “hmm” in line 18, and the pregnant silence “……” in line 23.

On the other hand, a closer look reveals some significant differences with spoken communication. First is the bundling of discrete messages, rather than overlap, which characterizes spoken interaction. The written channel is either ‘on’ or ‘off,’ and messages are not posted until the return key is pressed. One does not know what the other participants are writing until their message is complete. This can be a good thing – it prevents one from cutting off fellow interlocutors, assuring that everyone gets to complete their thoughts to their own satisfaction – but it does create a very different dynamic from face-to-face or telephonic communication.

Second, unlike most forms of discourse, coherence in the excerpt is based almost exclusively on the associative links among the word forms, all relating in some way to ‘moo.’ It is rather like living in Ionesco's play The Bald Soprano, with phrases being bantered about that at best have only an associative connection with one another. What is important to recognize is that this language play is encouraged by the medium of communication. The same group of graduate students met weekly with me for fifteen weeks, and never once did word play come up in our face-to-face interactions. The social roles of participants (instructor–students and peer-to-peer discussants) remained constant, and although the purpose of online interaction was to become familiar with the dynamics of interaction in a MOO environment, the specific task at hand (which became no more than a pretext) was to discuss conceptual differences across languages – very similar to the types of topics they discussed each week. The physical environment was different in that they were now in a computer lab rather than sitting around a seminar table; however, there was nothing ludic about the physical environment.

What is not represented in this static transcript is the quick-paced temporal rhythm of the exchange, or the spurts of laughter that accompanied the reading of classmates’ postings. This is an important methodological point, for even though the ‘text’ of the interaction is the same, the participants’ experience of the interaction as it unfolded turn by turn in real time was quite different from that of the reader confronted with a transcript on a printed page. Sometimes messages appeared on the screen in a quick batched flurry, alerting the reader to the fact that a number of extraneous messages might separate turns that are meant to go together, such as a response to a question. Other times there were prolonged screen ‘silences’ but lots of audible clicking of keyboards in the room, signaling active message production. Laughter brought readers’ attention to the screen, and made some participants scroll up, looking for a message they might have missed. It is important to note that in environments like MOOs and chatrooms, in which people are alternating reading with typing, almost no one reads all the messages that appear on the screen – there are always some that escape an individual reader's attention. But which particular turns or messages are missed will vary from participant to participant. This is very different from a face-to-face situation, where everyone hears everything. Although face-to-face speakers’ attention can vary, all are at least exposed to all turns, which is generally not the case in online synchronous chat, unless one is just observing and not contributing to the discussion.

Globally, we see that features of the MOO interface affect conversational behavior: the completely open floor (i.e., the lack of any clear turn allocation system) means that all participants can potentially be writing at the same time, which sometimes leads to a chaotic quality to the interaction. Participants consequently adopt new behavior to cope, such as breaking up their utterances into short fragments that will appear onscreen more quickly, and therefore closer to the utterance to which they are responding. These particular adaptations are specific to the environment, but they reflect a more general human tendency to adapt communicative behavior to the medium, which is not unique to electronic environments but has been the general rule since the origins of writing.

Wikis and We media

We now turn to an asynchronous example of collaborative online participation. Wikis are all about community involvement in the creation and maintenance of texts. A wiki (from Wiki Wiki, meaning ‘fast’ in Hawaiian) is a collaborative web environment that allows multiple authors to create, edit, and continually update interlinked web pages.Footnote ¹⁸ Unlike traditional co-authored texts, which might have two or three authors, wiki texts may involve the participation of an unlimited number of writers. Moreover, authors work anonymously, so even though a wiki is collaborative, one rarely knows who one's collaborators are. Wikis are best known as encyclopedias – most notably Wikipedia.org, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” started by Jimmy Wales in 2001, which as of 2014 had 287 encyclopedias in different languages – but they are also used in community websites, corporate intranets, online publications, collaborative document design, course and knowledge management systems, and note-taking applications.

Wikis serve different purposes. Some are hierarchical, giving users different levels of access, that is, control over different functions and content. For example, a wikimedia publication might allow no changes to original content, but allow readers to insert comments and propose links to other web content. Wikipedia.org, on the other hand, allows anyone to add or modify content, but content removal has to be explained and approved by community consensus. A wiki designed to produce a collaboratively authored document will usually not have any restrictions whatsoever. A key operative assumption is that Wikipedia can be trusted because there is a community behind it, with all information being reviewed by many people who are working together.

The counterargument is that the ‘democratic’ assumptions behind a wiki are unacceptable, and that what makes an encyclopedia valuable is the identifiable authority of its writers and the careful curation of its editors. This is the argument often endorsed by the traditional institutional gatekeepers of knowledge – schools, universities, and publishers. But then who decides who the real experts are? And who, in turn, decides who those decision makers choosing the experts should be?

The wiki phenomenon raises important questions about who is in control of language and knowledge, and reflects a broader movement to question cultural and intellectual authority. Wiki media (and self-publishing generally) are, in a broad sense, part of this anti-authoritarian movement. Who needs Brittanica when one has Wikipedia? Who needs Random House when one can self-publish with Amazon?

Not surprisingly, journalism is undergoing a similar transformation. Wikis and blogs are increasingly used in what is known as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘social media journalism.’ During the riots of late 2005 in France, for example, L'Hebdo, a Swiss magazine, sent journalists to Bondy, a suburb of Paris, to blog every day about what they observed and experienced. Months later, after the riots had subsided, the bloggers remained to portray post-riot life on the Bondy Blog, interviewing unemployed youth, hanging out with gang members, going to parties, and talking with the mayor. The reporters found that blogging influenced the way they recorded and reported events. It transformed their writing process, and changed their relationship to their readers, who would post feedback on their blog (Giussani, Reference Giussani2006). What was most remarkable was the impact on some of the idle youngsters from Bondy, who were trained by L'Hebdo to continue to blog themselves with editorial and technical support from the magazine. Five years later, in 2010, the dismal conditions in Bondy had not improved, but the Bondy Blog had become the voice of the region, and some of the young blogger/journalists had published major articles in France's most prestigious newspapers (Jeannet & Schenk, Reference Jeannet and Schenk2010). Through old media journalism and new media technology, the Bondy youngsters had become “actors in their own social space” (Giussani, Reference Giussani2006).

While this everyman approach to journalism has interesting implications, it also has its limits. On June 17, 2005, Michael Kinsley, an opinion and editorial editor for the Los Angeles Times, experimented with an online editorial about the war in Iraq entitled “War and Consequences” which readers were invited to rewrite. His ‘wikitorial’ attracted thousands of readers, many of whom took a hand in contributing to the piece. Additions and modifications appeared in bold and were time-stamped, and comments remained until the next contributor came along. But within two days the wikitorial experiment had to be called off due to online vandalism involving the posting of pornography. Commentators were mixed in their view of the wikitorial. Many saw it as inappropriate, since editorials are normally a matter of a single professional writer taking a coherent, well-reasoned stand on an issue, whereas a wiki turns it into an opinion free-for-all. Some saw it as a pointless use of interactivity just for the sake of interactivity. Others more optimistically saw the potential for a new kind of participatory opinion journalism that could reflect the multiple voices and points of view of a community.

The wikitorial experiment does raise interesting questions about the relationship of genre and medium. It's ostensibly one thing to have an encyclopedia where people are correcting information to make articles as accurate and as up to date as possible, and quite another to edit an ‘opinion’ piece as a reader, where it's not as much about verifying information as arguing a point coherently.

But the two tasks might not be as different as they might appear to be on the surface. One problem with Wikipedia is that it assumes that all information is good as long as it is accurate. But information, however accurate, is never neutral. For example, the Wikipedia entry on Martin Luther King includes information about his extramarital liaisons. For some readers, this information might diminish King's status as a great moral leader. While some Wikipedia participants might want the unvarnished truth, others might want to suppress this information about a man they consider a hero. Formerly, the writing of biography or history assumed that the author could produce at least one solid point of view about his subject. Other writers might publish biographies with different points of view. But each biography stood on its own. Wikipedia, on the other hand, militates against individual authors staking out a unique perspective undiluted by others’ views. As a consequence, Wikipedia potentially denies readers the advantage of engaging with the colloquy among disparate authors. We get information, but in the absence of editorial oversight the perspectives tied up with the information run the risk of becoming so homogenized that readers may not even recognize that multiple viewpoints are represented.

Finally, Wikipedia raises important questions about how knowledge should be substantiated and curated. To date, in order to validate itself within the encyclopedia genre, Wikipedia has stayed rather close to the Brittanica model, relying heavily on text, and requiring that entries include published source citations. But in the age of multimodal online technology, might this requirement be outdated? Many forms of knowledge are not encoded in writing, and if Wikipedia's ambition is to provide “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” (R. Miller, Reference Rieger2004), then it cannot limit itself to written knowledge (N. Cohen, Reference Cohen2011). Technology is not the obstacle: speech and video can be easily integrated with text, and they can be quoted as easily as text. Moreover, the requisite know-how is no longer the exclusive domain of experts but has become increasingly widespread among ordinary individuals. Rather, the obstacle lies in the social convention of acknowledging published (and that traditionally means print) sources. In trying to prove itself worthy by comparing itself to traditional print encyclopedias, Wikipedia is actually selling itself short. This is an area where social forces have put the brakes on technological momentum, and it will be interesting to see how the collective influence of individuals will or will not bring about institutionalized change.

But the Wikimedia movement may be slowed by material forces as well. People are increasingly using mobile phones to do tasks they used to do with computers. Editing Wikipedia pages is difficult to do on the small screen of a mobile phone, and fewer people are editing Wikipedia. As Noam Cohen of the New York Times writes, “smartphones and tablets are designed for ‘consumer behavior’ rather than ‘creative behavior.’ In other words, mobile users are much more likely to read a Wikipedia article than improve it. As a result, the shift to mobile away from desktops could pose long-term problems for Wikipedia” (Cohen, Reference Cohen2014, p. B1).