170 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
provides a domain in which we can see written language in its most
primitive state. Almost all the written language we read (informal
letters aside) has been interfered with in some way before it reaches
us – by editors, subeditors, revisers, censors, expurgators, copy-
enhancers, and others. Chatgroups are the nearest we are likely to
get to seeing writing in its spontaneous,unedited, naked state. Sec-
ondly, I see chatgroups as providing evidence of the remarkable
linguistic versatility that exists within ordinary people – especially
ordinaryyoungpeople (it would seem from the surveys of Internet
use). If you had said to me, a few years ago, that it was possible
to have a successful conversation while disregarding the standard
conventions of turn-taking, logical sequence, time ordering, and
the like, I would have been totally dismissive. But the evidence is
clear: millions are doing just that. How exactly they are doing it I
am still not entirely clear – though I hope this chapter has suggested
some guidelines. Plainly, they have learned to use their innate abil-
ity to accommodate to new linguistic situations to great effect. They
have developed a strong sense of speech community, in attracting
people of like mind or interest ready to speak in the same way, and
ready to criticize or exclude newcomers who do not accept their
group’s linguistic norms. They have adapted their Gricean param-
eters (p. 48), giving them new default values. And they are aware
of what they are doing, as is evidenced by their ‘metadiscussions’
about what counts as acceptable linguistic (and social) behaviour,
and their ‘metahumour’, playing with the group’s own linguistic
conventions. It is a performance which shows great adaptability
and not a little creativity. As David Porter observes:^73
As participants adjust to the prevailing conditions of anonymity
and to the potentially disconcerting experience of being reduced
to a detached voice floating in an amorphous electronic void, they
become adept as well at reconstituting the faceless words around
them into bodies, histories, lives... Acts of creative reading...can
and do stand in for physical presence in these online encounters.With virtual worlds, the linguistic creativity becomes even greater.
(^73) Porter (1996a: xii).