136 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
student conference they studied was over, it came to be read differ-
ently: ‘topics become chapters, even in print-out’.^15
Indeed, the reactions of the participants in the Davis and Brewer
study are interesting for another reason, as this further quotation
suggests:
Students forgot how to read across to find their entries. When one
group was presented with the print-out of the full conference, they
were momentarily puzzled until they could spread it out across
space and re-created the sense of connection they had when they
were part of the conference. Reading the artifact after the fact
demands a topical orientation which is not always sequential and
can be thematic across time and space.The non-linear nature of the interaction is highlighted here, and
this as we shall see has all kinds of linguistic consequences. Just as
we can ‘dip into’ a book, so we can dip into a group. When joining
a group, we can call up a recent or distant topic, then begin with
the most recent postings, or go back to ones made days, months, or
even years ago. There is no given chronological beginning-point.
Topics are classified thematically or by author within directories.
Within a topic, there is a stronger sense of chronological linearity,
as messages are organized in the order in which the server received
them. However, this is a presentational linearity only, of no com-
municative consequence: there is no guarantee that a sender E,
responding to message A, has read any of the messages B, C, D
which may have been sent to the group in the interim. Indeed, E
does not know whether A will read E’s response – or whether any-
one ever will. A may have logged off by the time E responds. And
it is always possible that a cluster of other messages may come in
(perhaps taking a topic in a different direction), so that when A
next logs on, E’s message may be so far back in the queue that it
will not be noticed. Because there is no obligation on E to respond,
and no expectation on A’s part that Ewillrespond, A may not go
looking for it. People’s time is limited: Davis and Brewer found,
on the basis of internal evidence in their corpus (the way senders
(^15) Davis and Brewer (1997: 162).