The language of chatgroups 133
The systems all operate in roughly the same way.^14 An organi-
zation provides a set of group options – such as the hierarchically
organized set of newsgroups on Usenet – which individuals who
have the appropriate software choose to join. Members then send
(post)theircontributions(articles,messages,posts)tothegroup,and
the system makes these available to all addresses it holds, some of
which may be other networks of addresses. Messages may be saved
in files for future reading or searching (archives,notebooks,logs,
conferences), and catalogued with varying depth of detail in terms
of date, topic, author, etc. The management of each group, or of a
particular task within each group, is in the hands of an individual
person or small team, identified by such role-labels aslist-owner,
editor,host,postmaster,maintainer,ormoderator. Different systems
areknownbytheiruseofoneorotheroftheselabels,andoftenmore
than one; for example, the person who owns a list and knows its
content may be labelled differently from the person who maintains
the list computationally. In this book, I usemoderatorasacon-
venient generic term for anyone who has managerial influence on
the operation of a group. Moderators exercise varying amounts of
power – for example, deciding whether a message is relevant or of-
fensive. Several groups have moderators whose power consists only
in whether to allow a message to appear or not (WELL hosts fall
into this category). Other groups allow their moderators to have
editing as well as filtering powers, enabling them to shorten an
overlong message, or to cut out obscenities, spam (p. 53), flaming
(p. 55), unauthorized advertising, and other unwanted material. Is-
sues of censorship and taste inevitably arise, in such contexts, and
(^14) However, the ‘life’ of a group is not the same. Although many groups have an indefinite
lifespan envisioned, others are created for specific and restricted periods of time. A school
or college may decide to create a conference chatgroup for a single year, or term, or for
part of a term, or for a particular project (as in the group studied by Davis and Brewer,
1997). Also, the students may only be able to access the group when in school, which
restricts operations to certain times of day. An academic group may decide to hold an
electronic conference over a precise period, allowing time for participants to have read
certain papers and to respond to them. For example, a linguistics online conference (the
first to be organized by the LINGUIST list) was held from 14 October to 4 November
1996 on the subject of binding theory.