ASL-home [11 May 2000]
"hi, a/s/l please?":
identification/categorization in computer-mediated communication
A paper/mosaic by Paul ten Have
presented at the 'Sociaal-Wetenschappelijke Studiedagen 2000', Session
ICT
& Huiselijk Leven; coordinator: Valerie Frissen
Note: A short version of the paper is available
in one file (24 July 2000).
The technical apparatus is, then, being made
at home with the rest of our world. And that's a thing that's routinely
being done, and it's the source of the failure of technocratic dreams that
if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine. the world
will be transformed. Where what happens is that the object is made at home
in the world that has whatever organization it already has.
Harvey Sacks (1992b): 548-9
Abstract
Questions like "hi, a/s/l please?" are often used to invite participants
in chat rooms to present themselves in terms of the categories Age, Sex
and Location. While in face-to-face encounters people use a wide range
of information sources to identify each other, technologically mediated
communication tends to offer a much more restricted range of information
types. This is the case in fixed telephone situations, for which a set
of cultural conventions have been established, but the same holds true
for mobile phones and various forms of computer-mediated communication
(CMC). 'Chatting' is one of the forms of CMC which is often discussed in
moral terms, but in this paper I will take a 'procedural' perspective,
asking how it is done in the first place: how do people who want to 'chat'
contact each other to discover whether the other fits their purpose? It
seems that basic categories like age, sex and location, as well as more
focussed, topic-related ones, play an essential role in getting chat-games
started.
Format
The 'paper' has been designed as a mosaic of several electronic documents
for which the current one acts as a home base. The reader is invited to
follow the links to these documents as described below.
-
MCA: an overview of the idea of Membership Categorization
Analysis, based on the original initiatives of Harvey Sacks, as well as
categorization devices used in more common interactional situations, both
face-to-face and on the phone; followed by an overview of the sequencing
organizations in which the use of categorization is embedded;
-
CHAT: an introduction into the technicalities
of the design of the chat-facility which I have studied;
-
ASL: an empirical exploration of categorization
as used in the organization of chatting;
-
DISC: a discussion of the limitations and implications
of the empirical exploration;
-
BIB: a list of references.
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