154 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
member appears at the beginning of the line and is shown in angle
brackets):
<Allvine>why on earth not?
<Roughneck>cos nobody wants to buy any
<Looopy>I’d buy some anytime
<Allvine>yeah but we aint all as rich as you
<Tootle2>you wouldnt
<Annjewel>Beatles CDs are real cheap at our local store...You can find out a little about who the participants are (by typing a
/whoiscommand),^44 but the only way to find out what is going on
is to sit back and watch for a while. ‘Make sure you follow the con-
versation before interrupting someone’ says the Chatnet manners
file,^45 and other networks offer similar advice. When you do decide
to join in, you need to adopt a different conversational strategy
and set of expectations about interaction. As with asynchronous
groups, even basic conventions, such as greeting and leave-taking,
are adapted. There is no symmetry to the exchange, for example.
When signing on, the IRC software tells the other users that you
have arrived (showing that the message is software-generated by
the use of the triple asterisk):
∗∗∗DC has joined channel #linglangYou may greet everyone if you wish, by saying ‘Hello everyone’ or
the like, but few if any of the other members will reply. If every-
one did, after all, it would flood the screen. There is an automatic
greeting facility, whereby the system immediately says ‘Hi all’, or
suchlike; however, many consider auto-greet to be poor chatgroup
etiquette, because it removes the personal element which is a part
of the medium. Some IRC help manners pages are quite firm on
the point: ‘Scripts that automatically greet people are considered
rude and not welcomed.’^46 Similarly, when you are about to leave,
(^44) /whoiselicits a small piece of information originally provided by the group member, e.g.
45 a self-description, an e-mail address, a favourite like or dislike, or a favourite quote.
46 http://www.chatnet.org/etiquette.htm.
From the Galaxynet NETiquette page:http://www.galaxynet.org.