| Chapter 2: | Chatrooms and Small Group Learning |
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In text-based chat programs like IRC, a number of users can connect into the same virtual space and communicate with one another in near real time using text. Unlike talk and ytalk, IRC sends completed messages over the neto work, rather than individual keystrokes. In other words, most chat programs allow interlocutors to compose comments in private,1 which are not revealed to others until the user presses the Enter key. In the conversation window, new comments are typically placed on the bottom of the screen when they arrive, causing older messages to be pushed up and eventually scrolled off the top of the screen.
Although there are some resemblances to other communication media, text-based chat technologies represent a new form of interaction. In the next sections, I describe two lines of research that have attempted to understand how this new medium changes interaction. First, I present results from linguistic analyses that have illustrated ways that this type of interaction relates to interaction in other media. Then, I focus on literature exploring new behavioral patterns that arise in online chat.
2.2.1 Linguistic Features of Chat Conversations
Due to the fact that chat messages are composed before being displayed, the usual turn-taking mechanisms that provide for an orderly conversation (Grice, 1975) break down. Chat messages appear in the temporal order that the chat server receives them; several conversational turns may occur between a comment and its response. Because there are no mechanisms for the orderly exchange of the conversational floor, threads of discussion tend to interleave in chat environments (Werry, 1996).