5Thelanguageofchatgroups
The Internet allows people to engage in a multi-party conversation
online, either synchronously, in real time, or asynchronously, in
postponed time (chapter 1). The situations in which such interac-
tions take place have been referred to in various ways, partly reflect-
ing the period in Internet history when they were introduced, and
partly reflecting the orientation and subject-matter of the group
involved, such aschatgroups,newsgroups,usergroups,chatrooms,
mailing lists,discussion lists,e-conferences, andbulletin boards.In
this book, I have usedchatgroupsas a generic term for world-wide
multi-participant electronic discourse, whether real-time or not.^1
There is a technical overlap with e-mailing: a mailing list is essen-
tially an e-mail address which redirects a message to a set of other
addresses. It is also possible for pairs of chatgroup members to
arrange to communicate privately by e-mail or using some other
messaging facility. However, from a linguistic point of view it is
important to distinguish the chatgroup from the e-mail situation
(chapter 4), in that the latter is typically between a pair of named
individuals (or institutions), with message-exchanges often lim-
ited to a single transaction, and relating to a specific, pre-planned
question.Chatgroups,bycontrast,typicallyinvolveseveralpeople,^2
(^1) Many people restrict the termchatto real-time contexts only. It should also be noted that
some systems are very sensitive to the correct use of their own terminology: for exam-
ple, Usenet users operate innewsgroups(orgroups), WELL users inconferences; Usenet
2 managers are callednews administrators; Internet Relay Chat managers areoperators.
Asynchronous groups have far more members, because there is no limit to the number
of people who can access the group, and there is no complication caused by members
belonging to different time-zones. Synchronous groups can get clogged if too many
people try to talk to each other at once, and many organizations try to limit population
growth. This issue is also a problem in virtual worlds: see p. 186. For a directory of
e-groups in the scholarly and professional spheres, see Diane Kovacs’ compilation at
http://www.n2h2.com/KOVACS.
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