Conversation analysis of online chatroom interactions : a case

Abstract

Computer-mediated discourse (Herring 2001) or Netspeak (Crystal 2001) is neither written nor spoken communication. It shares similarities with both and yet it also has a distinctive feature of its own. Some of these distincts features arise from the need for online users to try to compensate for the lack of physical proximity and extralinguistic cues. Others arise from the medium of the communication itself, for example one-way transmission systems, such as IRC, leads to disrupted turn adjacency and overlapping exchanges and this is why text-based online chatrooms seem interactionally incoherent yet its popularity continues to grow. Therefore, this thesis attempts to evaluate the international coherence, or lack of coherence, of chatrooms using Convention Analysis, and how users have adapted to it and even the compelling advantages, particularly language play and heightened interactivity, which it brings.