Page 39 - Cyberculture and New Media

30 Formalisms of Digital Text
______________________________________________________________
And this remains the case in spite of other distinctions operating within the
medium, for instance whether the genre in question is realised synchronously
(e.g., in the online chat) or not (e.g., in e-mails, mailing lists, newsgroups,
and discussion groups). In conventional writing, the author generally writes
to make a point. But in digital conversational writing online authors may
pursue another purpose, since the style of this writing appears structured so as
to reflect the social network in which the authors are participating.
Moreover, a peculiar relationship, functioning as ballast, holds
between physicality and orality, the absence of the former being compensated
by the use of the latter. Presumably, this manifests for two reasons, because
the lack of another means of communicating introduces non-verbal
communication into a predominantly textual medium and because networked
users, interacting in large numbers, can experience many kinds of interaction
almost simultaneously. Here a nexus of language is superimposed on one of
populace, a two-dimensional grid of continuous interaction: optimisations to
the traditional model of expository text are essential. In defining the notion of
virtual community, Howard Rheingold refers indirectly to the displacement
of presence by expression, when, pondering both the breadth of collective
contact and the demand for using language in the absence of material
presence to assist in those relationships, he remarks that people in virtual
communities continually

exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual
discourse, conduct commerce, exchange knowledge, share
emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud,
fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt,
create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual
communities do just about everything people do in real life,
6
but we leave our bodies behind.

We might conclude altogether that the more one looks into
conversational writing, the less it resembles traditional text either in purpose
or structure. The speed and quantity of messages (again, emphasizing points
rather than topics) almost compels a new definition for its medium-specific
functions, and one can understand the rationale for assertions like Ferris’s
“computer users often treat electronic writing as an oral medium:
communication is often fragmented, computer-mediated communication is
used for phatic communion, and formulaic devices have arisen” or Murray’s
7
classification of such writing as comprising a “language of action”.
We have enough here to deepen our examination of conversational
writing into specific questions posed by the foregoing comparisons. With the
generous amount of speculation on the characteristics of digital
conversational writing, one would expect a somewhat proportional body of