GriffJon.com = Thesis Preface

Preface

That's a partiality to remain within the functional infinite. That's a limit; you are the world.
--"Speaking Machine", interview, Fall 1998

Being the world, creating it-is this a limit? Wanting to or not, how could one not remain within the inifinite? This quotation becomes clear in the context of discourse on the Internet-there is a tension among the interplay of new possibilities, limits new and old, and presuming that everything is possible. This wreaks havoc on any broad interpretation of all the language and discourse that is happening on-line; it is perceived, used, and created in such a myriad of different frames that the apparently infinite number of them becomes very limiting. During the research for this thesis, I often compared myself to a kid in a candy store, with money to buy only a few pieces, and the decision was dreadful.

In the end, with some guidance from "Speaking Machine" among others, I chose to touch upon most of what currently comprises discourse on the Internet, but to focus upon the most fascinating area, interactive chat, in real-time. These are, essentially (though this is a crude metaphor, as we will see), large conversations among many people, combined with private note-passing, carried out purely by typing. I use an essentially linguistic approach, employing various methods of discourse analysis to try and dissect what is at the heart of Internet discourse. I will use example from the World Wide Web, as well as various types of e-mail, 'bulletin boards' or newsgroups, as well as the real-time chat.

Real-time chat, as seen on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks and on the more recent ICQ network, however, will be the focus of the paper. After making connections from these new methods of interaction to more traditional methods of treating discourse, I will turn to what is left over; what types of discourse do not connect well to conventional ideas, and how these discourse types have developed and what they are doing now.

Before continuing, I must point out that one of these new discourse events, passing, provides for many unpredictable interactions. Passing is using discourse styles of others to present oneself as something they are not. This is often done to confound age or gender and fit in with a group that otherwise one would be expelled from. Sometimes, however, someone else mistakes a person on-line for something they neither are nor are trying to be. The quote at the beginning, by "Speaking Machine," is truly by a speaking machine-it was generated by my personal computer running a program called "Babble", from various algorithms and previous input by myself (which never involved those words in that order, nor even near each other).

Welcome to the world of Internet discourse.

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