58 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
a very fast or competent typist. And selectivity in expression must
lead to all kinds of inclarity.
Fourthly, the maxim of relevance – that contributions should
clearly relate to the purpose of the exchange – is also undermined
in some Internet situations. What is the purpose of an Internet
exchange, one might well ask? In some cases, it is possible to define
the purpose quite easily – a search for information on a specific
topic on the Web, for example, or the desire to score points in a
fantasy game. In others, several purposes can be present simultane-
ously, such as an e-mail which combines informational, social, and
ludic functions. But in many cases, it is not easy to work out what
the purpose of the exchange is. People often seem to post messages
not in a spirit of real communication but just to demonstrate their
electronic presence to other members of a group, to ‘leave their
mark’ for the world to see (in the spirit of graffiti), or to use the
medium to help themselves think something out.^50 The extreme
situation is found in many chatgroups, where from the amount of
topic-shifting we might well conclude that no subject-matter could
ever be irrelevant. Informal conversation has long been recognized
for its relative randomness of subject-matter;^51 but identifying the
threads of subject-matter in a spoken dialogue is simplicity itself
compared with the nature of the exchanges in such chatgroups,
where several topics are being discussed at once, participants are
interpolating comments about the way the conversation is going,
and irrelevant utterances are being routinely introduced (as in the
case of spoofing) for ludic or other reasons. The notion of rel-
evance is usually related to an ideational or content-based func-
tion of language; but here we seem to have a situation where con-
tent is not privileged, and where factors of a social kind are given
precedence.
The social function of much Internet communication has been
a major theme of the literature in recent years, especially with
(^50) This enhancing feature of the medium is illustrated by the finding that electronic group
51 brainstorming seems to work better than its face-to-face counterpart: Wallace (1999: 84).
Crystal and Davy (1969: ch. 1).