The language of chatgroups 155
you may precede your departure with a reason – good etiquette, to
avoid any suggestion that you are leaving in a huff – but again, few
if any others will acknowledge.^47
Following your arrival, you may decide to send a comment re-
lating to what Allvine, for example, has just said. However, you do
not know if Allvine will react to it, or even see it (he – if it is a he,
for the gender of a nick is often unclear, as we shall see – may not be
watching the screen at that moment).Others may choose to react to
it instead – and more than one person may react at the same time,
making the same point independently. Further new arrivals to the
group, in the meantime, will react to a point without having seen
the earlier points that a member has made, which may already have
anticipatedtheirreaction.Thereisapermanentshiftingofthegoal-
posts. Nor can any real-world time-scale be taken for granted: the
order in which messages arrive is governed by factors completely
outside the control of the participants, such as the speed of their
computers and the processing capacities of the service providers.
None of this makes for a ‘conversation’ in the conventional sense
of the term.
The point about timing is of especial relevance for synchronous
chatgroups. In chapter 2 (p. 31) I discussed the notion oflag–
the time it takes for a sender’s typing to appear on the screens
of others. Lag is not a serious issue in asynchronous groups, as
computer-mediated delays will not usually be noticed, given the
elongated time-frames involved; but in synchronous groups it is
critical. If an intervention is delayed too long it becomes irrelevant,
as the conversation has moved on. And all lags add a degree of dis-
ruption to what is already a fairly comple xinteraction. Chatgroup
lags range from slight delays of a few seconds to the total disap-
pearance of group members. A particularly disturbing situation
is the ‘Netsplit’ which happens in IRC, where one of the servers
(^47) The variety of group practices must be respected, nonetheless: the IRC group studied by
Gillen and Goddard (2000) did make use of greeting and farewell sequences, including
ludic variants. In their group, though, the names of the participants who are on-line at
any time are shown in a panel on the screen, which perhaps establishes a greater sense
of personal presence in the interaction, and thus raises expectations that such sequences
will be used.