162 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
afterthebodyoftheirmessage–asadiscoursesignaltotheintended
recipient. This is not necessary when just two or three members
are holding the floor on a single topic, or where people are directly
addressing a topic rather than an individual, or where a topic is so
distinct from the surrounding ‘noise’ that any contributions to it
are unambiguous. But relatively few synchronous chats are so well
organized, and the use of nicks in direct address thus becomes an
invaluable means of linking sets of messages to each other. They are
analogous to the role of gaze and body movement in face-to-face
conversation involving several people: in talking to A, B, C, and D,
I can single out B as the recipient of a question simply by mak-
ing eye-contact, and while I am doing that other people can talk
to each other without confusion. Naming is unnecessary in such
circumstances. It would be most unusual to hear:
Mary: John, are you going to rehearsal tonight?
John: Mary, yes I am.
Mary: John, what time?
John: Mary, about six.Initial naming of this kind takes place in spoken interaction only
when the parties cannot see each other, such as a telephone confer-
ence call, or in radio programmes where an interviewer is dealing
with several people at once:
Frank Smith, what are your views on this?Even there, it is not so common as in the chatgroup situation.^56
Unlike asynchronous conversations, topics decay very quickly.
It is in fact not at all easy for group members to keep track of a
conversation over an extended period of time. Not only do other
people’s remarks get in the way, some of those remarks actually
act as distractions, pulling the conversation in unpredictable di-
rections. The pull may even take the entire interaction well away
from the supposed topic of the channel. In one of Herring’s studies,
(^56) Initial clarificatory naming was conventional practice in Werry’s (1996) IRC samples.