150 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
the opportunity it provides for equal participation. Students who
might be reserved in a real-world class, or who find no opportunity
to make a contribution there (perhaps because of class sizes or the
presence of hyperverbal classmates), now have an equal chance to
make their voice heard – and several of those voiceswillhave novel
and stimulating things to say. Such groups are especially valued by
those students with limited or irregular hours – perhaps because
they have to work for their living in order to attend college – and
for whom communicative flexitime is a godsend. The situation also
helps them get to know the other members of their class, especially
if the class does not meet often (infrequent real-life encounters
increase the motivation for engaging in a chatgroup). But above all,
the classroom conference facilitates the exchange of ideas among a
population operating at the same educational level – as opposed to
interactionswithteachersorotherexperts.Anditisthispeer-group
factor which characterizes asynchronous chatgroups in general.
People join a group because they know they are talking to their
peers. They are assumed to be equals (whether they are, in real life,
or not) and will be judged as such, on the basis of the quality of their
messages. Language, accordingly, becomes the primary means of
establishing and maintaining group membership and identity.
It seems likely, then, that – once proper descriptive work has been
carried out – asynchronous chatgroups will emerge as a distinct
variety of language (p. 6). Some writers, conscious that we are
dealing with a relatively recent technology, have been uncertain
about this. Davis and Brewer, for example, describe their classroom
conference as ‘a new register in written electronic discourse, more
comple xthan one would at first assume’, and at the end of their
studycautiouslysuggestthatitis‘apparentlyanemergentregister’.^41
Their caution is chiefly due to the fact that their users – students
engaged in a specific task – were involved for only a relatively short
period of time, and thus had little opportunity to evolve the kind of
communal linguistic conventions that a register would require. Yet
the amount of shared linguistic distinctiveness which did emerge
(^41) Davis and Brewer (1997: 34, 157).