The language of chatgroups 149
limitations) of the medium. Experienced chatgroup members, fa-
miliar with a group’s software, owning sophisticated personal hard-
ware, and with time available to be regular participants, can forget
that many aspiring chatgroup participants meet none of these cri-
teria. They may be working with machines that have very limited
editing facilities, for example, so that their messages take on a draft-
like character, with errors difficult to correct. But everyone has to
learn to live with the fact of data persistence, with their messages
becoming part of a corpus that cruelly retains all the infelicities
which characterize unplanned and unrevised text. Errors or inad-
equacies of expression last, in principle, for ever. Even if a sender
posts a later message correcting a misunderstanding, there is no
guarantee that future readers will see it.
This is just one of the cautionary points that relate to this
medium. College instructors who ask for feedback from their chat-
group students quickly encounter other problems. Several criti-
cisms of the asynchronous situation are made. The idea of getting
messages from a lot of people sounds exciting, at first, but the ex-
perience of being flooded with messages on a particular class dis-
cussion point can be overwhelming. Thirty or forty might come in
at once, and it is not as if each of these messages is going to be inter-
estingly different from the others. There is likely to be a great deal of
repetitiveness and banality. Forty people all saying that they ‘did’ or
‘did not’ like a chapter in a novel soon ceases to be inspiring. Every
teacher knows the boredom that can set in when marking large
numbers of essays. In an electronic classroom, the boredom ele-
mentisdistributedtoall.Asonestudentputit:‘Idon’twanttoknow
whateveryoneelse in my class thinkseveryweek.’ The problem,
however, is not the classroom, but the medium. The asynchronous
chatgroup is a medium that promotes redundancy. Because mem-
bers do not know what others have said until their messages appear
on screen, duplicated subject-matter is inevitable.^40
Ontheotherhand,thebenefitswhichcomefromthemediumare
considerable. In the classroom case, both students and teachers cite
(^40) This affects synchronous chatgroups too: cf. the ‘losing’ convention, p. 184.