156 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
(e.g. in Australia) loses its connection with the others (e.g. in the
UK, Canada, USA, Japan). In this illustration, any Australian par-
ticipants in the chatgroup would suddenly sign off, without warn-
ing, leaving unanswered communications in cyberlimbo. From the
point of view of the other members, there is no way of knowing
whether someone has left deliberately or not. The situation only
clarifies when the link is restored and the other participants emerge
online again.
The widespread experience of lag, and the knowledge of its
causes, must be one of the factors which influence the overall length
ofchatgroupmessages.Peopleareunderpressuretokeeptheirmes-
sagesshort,overandabovethenaturaltendencytosavetimeandef-
fortwhilesending.IRCmakesthisveryplaininitshelpmannersfile:
Do not ‘dump’ to a channel or user (sendlarge amounts of
unwanted information). This is likely to get you kicked off the
channel or killed off from IRC.Dumping causes network‘burps’,
connections going down because servers cannot handle the large
amount of traffic anymore.The principle applies not just to large amounts of text, but to all
chat messages. ‘Do not repeat in a channel’, says the Galaxynet
NETiquette page. And indeed, there are several signs of a marked
trend towards succinctness: paragraph-like divisions are extremely
rare; contributions tend to be single sentences or sentence-
fragments; and word-length is reduced through the use of abbre-
viations and initialisms. Typical contributions are:
ifeelmuchbetternow
think I’ll sit this one out
whereRU
how it going?
hi Rococu
who wanna msg me [=message]
yeah right
someone has taken my nick!!!!!A sample of 100 direct-speech contributions taken from published
log data showed an average of 4.23 words per contribution, with