| Chapter 2: | Chatrooms and Small Group Learning |
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Although this has led many to speculate about the difficulties that can arise from these new threading structures (e.g., Farnham, Chesley, McGhee, Kawal, & Landau, 2000; M. Smith, Cadiz, & Burkhalter, 2002), reports of smaller group discussions (i.e., composed of less than about 15 people) rarely identify this as a problem (e.g., McDaniel, Olson, & Magee, 1996). For example, in conducting my research with a number of college students in multiple learning domains, no one reported problems with conversational threading. Herring (1999), having analyzed this lack of interactional coherence related to threading structures, suggests that the popularity of chat in spite of this limitation may have to do with the new types of linguistic play enabled, such as the ability to participate in multiple “conversations” at once.
The linguistic structure of chat interaction tends to look somewhat like that of face-to-face interaction (Condon & Cech, 1996), but with some notable exceptions. Because of the reduced efficiency involved in typing, chat conversations typically omit unnecessary linguistic information, such as some grammatical structures and elaborations/repeats of ideas (Condon & Cech, 1996). Similarly interlocutors in a chatroom rely heavily on abbreviations (Werry, 1996), which often serve as linguistic markers to identify membership in the in-group (Wenger, 1998; Cherny, 1999; Sassenberg, 2002). Although there is some evidence to suggest that this type of linguistic play may be an important component of identity development more generally (Bruce, Peyton, & Batson, 1993; Turkle, 1995; Merchant, 2001), this is beyond the scope of this book.