NOTE: This paper is a draft only. The
analyses which are referred to below are unfinished.
The paper was presented here as discussion fodder for the those involved in
the Cybermind
Gender Consciousness Project , and for interested members of the Cybermind
and Netdynam mailing lists, as well as those interested in the construction
of gender in discursive social practices. A fully revised and published version
of this paper can be found online at
Transforming Cultures, Cybermind special edition.
Please do not quote without permission.
Notions about gender identity and the relationship of gender to the dynamics of online interaction forms the locus of many discussions and research into the nature of computer mediated communication (CMC) and online interaction. In this study, a broadly sociological perspective is adopted, and identity, ideology, and gender in the context of computer mediated communities of practice are discussed using the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to look more closely at some of the interactive norms that seem to form at levels from the events themselves through to what seem to be observable patterns of interaction over longer periods of time. Here I attempt to characterise patterns of interactivity and exchange structure in two asynchronous communities of practice, or written speech communities (email lists) looked at via expectations related to gender roles. This view regards social practices related to learning how to be gendered, as a function of our sets of identities - not always because we choose to perform as such gendered identities, but because we are called upon to account for ourselves as identities in gendered ways.
Fairclough(1992) notes that the significance of Foucault's view of discourse as constitutive of social life is that it contributes to the production, transformation and reproduction of the objects - and subjects - of this social life, and that furthermore, "language signifies reality in the sense of constructing meanings for it, rather than that discourse is in a passive relation to reality" (42). Fairclough goes on to link this constitutive role for language to the notion of power, and to Foucault's sense of 'technologies of power', in which such technologies serve to work upon 'bodies' themselves; techniques affecting the control of bodily dispositions and habits, which are said to be adapted to the demands of modern forms of economic production. One of these technologies, 'discipline', is exemplified by Fairclough as
" ...'normalizing judgement', and the ways in which systems of punishment constantly measure individuals against norms. Although discipline is a technology for handling masses of people, it does so in a highly individualizing way, in a way which isolates and focuses in on each and every individual in turn and subjects them to the same normalizing procedures." (op cit: 52).
In exemplifying another technology, 'confession', Fairclough glosses Foucault's analysis as
"The compulsion to delve into and talk about oneself, and especially one's sexuality, in an ever widening set of social locations, [which] appears on the face of it to be a liberating resistance to objectifying bio-power. Foucault believes, however, that this is an illusion: confession draws more of the person into the domain of power" (op cit: 53).
In its fundamental sense, power is constituted through actual bodily threat, but what Fairclough points out is that such bodily threat is linked through language to disciplinary processes which occur in every socially constructed institution. A police force might be seen, for example, as coercing the population, as individual bodies, into obeying the 'law'. But the law, in its turn, is documentary in nature, discussed and eventually laid down in terms of the dominant discourse, shored up, legitimised in talk about 'right' and 'wrong' - in effect, a moral document.
If we turn to the institutional processes of an emailing list, constituted entirely in languaging and dependent on a technological code, what representatives of the 'moral order' are evident? I would suggest, along with Fairclough, that it has something to do with the enforcement of norms, via a constant measuring of performance, teamed with threat of punishment, and an encouragement to see personal confession as a means of liberating oneself from the constraints of the body, or the 'bio-power' cited above.
However, if the body is 'absent' in a technologically mediated environment, as has been proposed in at least one recent publication (Leder, 2000), and if for argument's sake we accept that this is the case in the specific context of a mailing list, how is such a moral order to be effected? If sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, how are moral orders in the context of written-only interaction to have any effect or meaning? Indeed, this feature of the context would mean that "anything goes" in such a textually-constituted 'community' - that any words would be allowable, since there is no body 'there' to be hurt or offended by such 'actions', and that therefore no threat of punishment - no counter-offensive words - would be effective. Extending this even further, this would suggest that in fact, things are NOT done with words, to paraphrase Austin, Searle, and other similar philosophers of language.
Certain assumptions seem to be in play here. Putting aside the obvious power that listowners have to exclude email addresses from participating, the assumptions on which the above views of list participation rest, seem, firstly, to do with a neo-Cartesian stance that consciousness - 'mind' - can be distinguished from 'body'. To quote one of the participants to Cybermind's discussion on the nature of 'gender consciousness': "I may be present in a female body, but my (mind) inside is completely different." Secondly, another common-sense assumption seems to be operating in some participants' minds, one in which the body ends at the skin, that the individual is primary and its personal feelings more significant and worthy of report than those of the community as a whole, and that the space where list activity goes on is in the machine, on the screen.
In this case, where a division of mind and body is taken as read, it seems a short leap to actually believe the childhood taunt as to sticks and stones, i.e. 'real' physical material objects being the only means of hurting 'me'…or anyone else. One might reasonably assert that therefore there was no such thing as the violence done by words. One would expect, however, that this would fly in the face of 'experience', phenomenologically-speaking: we are interpellated from birth, as actors in our own dramas, and through these socialising processes, as Foucault amongst others is at pains to point out, affected in every way. Words themselves, and the contexts in which they are used, have the power to evoke strong emotions and associations. Without such associations, there would also be no poeisis, no propaganda, no exhortation to war, or any advertising industry, and neither would literature or any text have the power to move us to tears or laughter - to cite a few gross examples. These habits of languaging are inscribed in our bodies, and therefore it seems difficult to describe the boundary which defines the place where physical hurt, and mental hurt, begins and ends.
Along with these assumptions, a concurrent idea that language is a form of personal self-expression, and that it has very little to do with social activity, seems to be prevalent. The idea that meaning and knowledge are not embodied in the text, but in the nodes where reading, and interpretation occurs, is not part of such a view, or at least, stands in contradiction to it. The alternative view which I am supporting here, is that meaning and knowledge is not held in the individual at all, but in the community at the point of exchange of meanings. Anyone in doubt of such a notion, need only experiment by setting up their own personal mailing list with no other subscribers, then sending out posts after setting NOACK and NOREPRO. What meaning have one's messages, when there is no _body_ to read them? Gendered or not?
In a community of receptive _bodies_, the power to silence, to shame, or to control the whats and the hows of participation in ways analysed by Foucault and touched on above, will be vested in those who are able to wield their words in order to do so. Until you have felt the rush of adrenalin in the body which sits attached by vision and active fingertip to the machine as it sits reading the words on a screen, or even spent time weeping over what has been addressed to you, or to others about you, then you may participate limblessly in nowhere in blissful ignorance of the intensely implicated body in all this. Furthermore, when considering a list of over 300 members, when only an average of 10 addresses/personas (not to give names to disembodied participants reading what we write) interact on a screen, whither the community of silent members? As they read your words, do they also realise that they do not exist? That their responses to your words are not embodied at all?
What I am saying here is, of course, that the nature of gender is a social construct. A social institution mapped onto bodies in ways which start even before birth in many instances. Bodies of one biological sex or another and their gender therefore generally coincide, because socialisation practices ensure that this is the case. One reason for this acceptance may be because language and other forms of communication which the young baby needs to master in order to participate in its community, are usually gender-inflected. At every turn, people ask, people act, people speak to either a boy or a girl. Those 'trapped' in a body not of their perceived gender, usually still perceive themselves as 'gendered', and take to adopting the semiotic markers of that sex which they are not, in biological terms. Those participating on Cybermind, for example, may be tired of gendered behaviour, type-casting and even the languaging they are used to doing in offline life, but despite such gender fatigue, their social life has nevertheless left them with the legacy of a gendered set of 'orders of discourse' - ways of relating to each other and to the social institutions which constitute the society in which they live. Their very experience of gender fatigue stems from this constant array of gendered expectations.
Those interested in linguistic relativity will find it amusing to note, for example, that in the culture of most socialised women in the west, there is a proliferation of lexical terms referring to the fine distinctions in the description of leg attire - the matter of size is defined to a delicate level, dependent on system choices within the type of leg attire one intends to purchase: whether the signified has the signifier 'stockings', 'pantyhose', or 'tights'. Size systems vary between a numerical ordering on the even (e.g.10, 12, 14, 16), or non standardized descriptives (e.g. small, medium, large, queen). Meaning, is as usual, motivated, and on Cybermind it was pointed out that such a simple question as 'What size pantyhose do you wear?' would function to a great degree of accuracy in discriminating the female from the male, by the female. Other types of question would function similarly for male-based knowledge. The point here was not that such knowledge was unavailable to either gender, but that material culture (including the body), and languaging experiences, are interrelated and highly implicated in social processes: in learning how to mean. For a woman, such knowledge is likely easily called upon, but not for a man: this is not a statement about biological differences, but about the nature of social experiences which are a function of being identified as either male or female.
In an older discussion on Cybermind (August 1997) on the nature of gender and the orders of discourse associated with it, the constitutive nature of discourse was foregrounded by one of the participants. The paradoxical nature of a perceived 'gender-neutral' discussion context was well made. The dominant mode of discussion, and talk in general, was outlined as being very much invested in the individualised "I" as active agent, in which the declaration of one's own position as justification of any point of view, or any ideological stance, is made authoritatively and with little negotiatory space left for other participants to take up other positions without defending them. This was said to be a tendency of male participants, who were said to be used to taking an adversarial stance with respect to other interlocutors, a stance which had been socially encouraged, one in which 'competitiveness' and verbal acumen were highly valorised. Such a stance, it was pointed out, made any other mode of interaction in that context problematic: either one adopted a similarly argumentative, combative stance, or one's argument or point of view would be of necessity, 'howled down'. If it were accepted that females as a gender are socialised differently than males, and are expected to perform differently in different roles, then the constitutive role of languaging practices in this socialisation cannot be entirely denied. So that, if females have not had the opportunity to take up the adversarial role in many areas of their social life, then their skills in playing the competitor would necessarily be underdeveloped. Laying aside the question over whether such adversarial skills are necessarily the most valuable in a competitive world, it can be seen that if females have been socialised in their speech and interaction patterns to strive rather for alignment and solidarity with their interlocutors, if they have been constantly rewarded for being the 'good listener' (e.g. by not interrupting, or by making noises of 'sympathetic circularity' - uh-huh, Mmm, yeah, go on, I see…) then their arguments, will, by their very nature, be dominated, swallowed by the 'male' mode of interaction.
In such a context, if 'identified females' (i.e. those who are gendered as female by whatever means) wish to have their voices heard, they may need to align, or claim solidarity with the dominant modes - by either adopting their discursive practices, or by claiming solidarity through ideational agreement, or both. This also means that the 'female mode' of interaction (if such a thing may be generalized from discursive practices) in a mixed group may be effectively silenced: even if skilled and used to an adversarial stance, by their very status as 'identified female', interactants may be expected by socialised males to adopt the usual good listener, non-dominant position in talk, and be censured by various means - ignoring the contributions, belittling the opinions expressed, etc, by any vocal identified-as females.
In a study by Herring et al (1999) it was noted for example, that in an academic discussion list the normal ratio of male-female contributions was 70-30. When, over a 2 day period, this ratio changed so that male-female participation rates became closer to 50-50, some of the male participants felt that the female participants were flooding or taking over the list discussions. If the topics of conversation were still academically-focussed, there would seem to be no rational explanation for such anxiety and misapprehension.
Attitudes and practices related to gender in this way may also explain the formation of female-only groups on the net and in other places, where such modes of interaction, and the complications of male-female psychological interaction, would be obviated.
Discourse mode is of course, an abstraction of discourse practice in general, and is a learnt mode of activity, socially learnt during a lifetime of embodied experiences. These experiences include the reading of what others have said or written, which in turn are based on those writers' own embodied experiences - whether 'real' or imagined. The whole notion of knowledge and experience in this sense, is envisaged as encoded by chemical transformations which occur in the body as reactions to patterns of events, as 'habitus' to use Bourdieu's term. This means that we each carry about with us sets of habitual ways of reacting to the world, habitual ways of referring to reality, of using language to commune, and to set up social relations. In this view, language is not a means of 'exchanging information' in discrete packets of true or false, but essentially a means of enacting relationships. The interaction on an email list a technologically-mediated means of enacting relationships, operating under its own sets of social practices perhaps, but as part of one's other daily activities in which one is hailed constantly, and called to account for one's identity thereby, it may also serve to set up language habitus in participant members. The email list with its own sets of practices, norms, or frames for understanding what is going on, needs to be experienced by participants as a context for action. When one gets used to interacting in any social group without having to resort to 'looking up the rules', a certain set of practices has been learnt, a social habitus for that group, has been taken on.
My contention, therefore, is that the body is nowhere absent whenever human interaction is involved; that using language is in every respect dialogic in Bakhtin's term - that each utterance prospects another, and is a product of all shared texts which have preceded it and to which it makes reference. Thus the utterance has only social meaning, which needs to be read against the twin levels of social (or speech) community - which gives language its allowable meaning potential - and the level 'instantiation', the point at which the exchange of meaning occurs, when the utterance is read or interpreted by another 'consciousness'. Of course, if consciousness can be conceived of as dis-embodied, or transcendent, then my contention will not make sense.
---------------------
The nature of so-called 'cybersex' relates to this area of enquiry, mainly because of its possibilities for exploitation of the traditional gender boundaries, as well as for problems associated with accounting for the way the body can be engaged in practices which are essentially text-based. While cybersex is not (usually) engaged in on email lists for obvious reasons (its asynchronic and public mode the best), the relationship between text and the body, as well as the occasional discussions/threads on Cybermind related to this topic, means that a short discussion on the nature of cybersex seems appropriate here.
Many of these discussions seem to centre on a notion of extension of the body by means of cyber-enhancement: we are all cyborg now, and need never leave our keyboards. The body's capabilities have been extended in this view.
Rather, it is my contention that languaging practices have been inscribed on the body in a way in which we can view the body as text, and in this way account more fully for the ways in which cybersex could be theorised as working via languaging practices, and the texts produced via languaging. This view sees language, imagination, and pleasure, as interdependent. We only exist as subjects by virtue of our existence in language - and this itself is an illustration of the essential fusion of mind and body.
Considering the phenomenon of a 'wet dream', it is not difficult to acknowledge its likely dependence on re-synthesised experience. Somehow, language must be implicated in the formation of the imagination - via socialisation practices and its associated languaging mediated by the vehicle of the experiencing and experienced body. These experiences, in turn, some neuroscientists argue (e.g. Douglas F. Watt), are activated in the very young child by the body's emotional response 'wiring' - in their accounts, emotion and consciousness are interdependent. If it were not the case that such language traces (re)activate bodily experiences, then pornographic literature - verbal accounts of bodily experience - would presumably have no market. Embodied experience is the only experience we have. After all, one never forgets how to ride a bicycle, even when the actual conscious memory of doing so is long forgotten.
I contend that writing is not separable from the body, except as a trace of the body's passing - what it leaves behind as inscription in transformed materiality. Writing is in some sense, akin to masturbation, if auto-eroticism can be said to be a close synonym for 'masturbation'. But auto-eroticism with an audience, a version of spectator sex, a type of exhibitionism. When people 'type with one hand', it is done without really knowing what the other is doing: whether the other is merely reading along, or whether he or she is 'participating' to the degree indicated in written responses. In this sense, cybersex can be likened to writing pornographic literature and getting instantaneous reviews. The concern of the writer is not so much directed at giving pleasure to the Other in either writing pornography, masturbating, or indulging in cybersex - the objective is self-centred and narcissistic rather than community or relationship-building.
In some senses, then, an email list may be considered as a site for a version of cyber-sexual behaviour….
--------------------------
It is intended that the following sections of the completed paper will look at excerpts from the interaction of two email lists, Cybermind and Netdynam, in order to show how gendered identity online may still be significant in negotiation over moral order - in other words, what is considered of significance, is appropriate, or proper to say. I see this as reflecting ideological stance and the positioning of others in relation to social practices. Occasionally this is revealed through looking at larger patterns at a macro level, by reference to close linguistic analysis of a corpus of texts taken from different periods of list activity in order to examine, for example, whose posts are responded to, and whose are ignored. The study will also analyse some of the positioning and stance-taking moves that are made at the level of event, and which might act to shame or negatively position Addressees in front of the audience of Overhearers and other participants - and in this way, contribute to the formation of norms of interaction for these communities of practice.
What appears below constitutes a discussion of the methodological considerations used in this study, as well as an initial report of findings based on a preliminary analysis of a set of posts taken from the Netdynam mailing list.
-------------
For the purposes of this study, I originally chose to concentrate on a series of posts which are in some sense constrained by the actual topic of gender, and which are therefore likely to result in discourse which makes overt reference to social practices and ideological stances which relate directly to the notion of gender. However, it is my contention that social practices related to reproducing ideology of any type, including expectations as to appropriate gender roles, are negotiated in social groups via interaction, and are 'built up' over time. Thus, within any social context or within group-maintained discursive boundaries, participants develop ways of interacting according to perceived norms for that group of participants. The short excerpts used for analysis, therefore, and any single posts/texts presented here, can only be seen as nodes in a complex web of inter-relating features which point to synoptic patterns, but are mainly treated as instantiations of dynamic and participatory patterns of interacting over time.
==============
One of the aspects of this 'complex web' relates to the fact that each participant in such a 'speech community', especially in the context of an email discussion list such as the one in the study, is also a participant in other local and global contexts of interaction and discursive practices which interpellate them, or 'call them into being', over long periods of time. As mentioned previously, such socialisation practices I see as being 'inscribed' in the body, and believe that overt material markers such race, gender, and social class are the most obvious markers that other participants, in whatever social group, may use in order to 'call a person into existence' through interacting with them - by recognising them as a particular identity. The types of identities available, in turn, are constrained and allowed by the interactions of various groups-within-cultures, and their inter-related social practices. In a text-only environment, these overt markers are often claimed to be non-existent, but the split in the context of situation - between that of textual register, and that of material context (cf Halliday and Hasan 1985) - is not always taken into account in these claims, resulting in concurrent notions as to the absence of the body in cyberspace. However, if, as I am saying, socialisation practices result in affectual responses to words, and in interpellations which may cause offence, as well as in habitual ways of speaking and interacting, then the body cannot be said to be completely absent in online communication, except at the mediated interface between Addresser and audience - in the text as object on the screen - but not absent in the utterance as meaning in a social person, as he or she reads and responds to any text.
Responding to what we've already processed as 'text' goes on continuously - when we make any interactive response, by addressing or hailing our imagined audience, we interact according to expectations of further responses occasioned by our experiences: "Ultimately all the meaning of all the words is derived from bodily experience", to quote Lewin et al, 2001: 8, quoting Halliday and Hasan, 1985, quoting Malinowski, 1935, vol 2: 58.
=================
The goal of this study therefore, is not to restrict analysis to those threads (conversations) indicated by aspects of registerial field (or 'topic'), which may be centred on the theme of gender for example, and which may therefore reveal overt attitudes and ideological positioning, but rather to look at the actual interactive process over time, and the positions taken up and resisted by listmembers (participant-posters/ personas) who identify themselves as either male or female. The distinction 'identified as' is important in this context: because gender roles are not seen as essential to the biological sex of any participant, it is possible that anyone can take up or 'perform' any gender role, especially when the overt material markers of gender are not present. I believe, however, that in practice it would be difficult to do this. It would be difficult to engage in interaction as a member of the gender one had not experienced in materiality, and with which one had not interacted in a culture's various social practices, due to the absence of lived experience, or 'habitus'. Just as it is difficult to participate fully as a new member in any group - such as a close family, whose long-time members communicate using their own jargon or in-group language and references to shared experiences - I believe that it would be difficult to maintain a cross-gendered _interactive_ performance, even in a text-only environment. This stems from a belief that habits of languaging in whatever context is a learned activity, and that without interactive experience - of responding to, and being responded to within the discourse using community itself - of having "learnt how to mean" in that community of practice - one is not able to interact as a recognisable identity within that group.
====================
On the other hand, my contention would be that, due to the lack of overt gender markers in online communication, the expectation of dual gender roles could override any knowledge gaps (on the part of a gender-performer) made obvious in any contribution. Moreover, the expectation that one is either male or female makes it necessary for participants to identify another participant as either male or female in order that they can continue interacting with them comfortably in many cases. When posters first present themselves to a list as active participants and do not indicate a particular gender identity, this then can become an area of discussion - either backchannel, or onlist - and sometimes indirectly via comments made to the audience as a whole. This is one important indication that ways of interacting with others, even in a so-called body-less mode, is governed to some extent by expectations as to gender roles.
=====================
Apart from the texts which have been chosen for topics related to gender, the other texts in the study have been chosen in as random a manner as possible: my incoming posts are saved in a separate folder in files defined by day and by month. The month's posts which I had last previously saved in this manner had been February 2002, and so I decided to use the posts from that month as the representative text. As a control, and to get an idea of whether and how individual posters and list traffic overall had changed, I also used texts from the first February of the list, 1996. As list traffic was much heavier then, the size of the whole month's files was far too large to analyse, and so for the present, I have decided to limit the contrast text file to a more comparable size, and have used only the first 5 days of posts from that month: February 1 until February 5th, 1996. This means that so far, the texts for this study combined, comprise approximately 69,150 words, and represent a total of 236 posts. This is obviously unwieldy for any close analysis in the short term, however, the goals of the study mean that patterns may be observed in the short term, and correlated with more detailed patterns as analysis proceeds. This information is summarised in table 1.
|
No of posts |
No of words |
Average No of words per post |
No of male posters |
No of female posters |
|
|
1-28 Feb 2002 |
114 |
28,350 |
248 |
8 |
7 |
|
1 -5 Feb 1996 |
122 |
39,800 |
326 |
10 |
8 |
Table 1: Summary of two main text files
=============================
One of the first of these patterns to be looked at is the ratio of male-female participants, and within that, the orientation-posting behaviours of these participants. To do this, each post was tagged by (identified as) male or female Addresser to either a male or female (named) Addressee. If the post was made with no salutation, the identified gender of the Addresser was noted to have posted to everyone and no-one in particular, if to several named Addressees of a variety of genders, to M/F addressees.
The raw score of orientation to other participants according to perceived gender is interesting in itself, but only to a certain degree. In order to more delicately characterise the responding behaviour of participants, posts were analysed as either merely Responding, or as making a Reply (after Goffman, 1981) according to whether:
-- the Addresser used any proposition in the Addressee's previous contribution in order to 'change topic' or assert new information related to only one or two lexical referents. This is identified by lack of any extended reference to the Addressee's experiential meanings, mood elements, or evaluative positioning (Response), or
-- the Addresser responded to the propositional content of the Addressee's earlier post by enhancing, elaborating or extending its experiential meanings, and taking up to support or refute (argue with) the evaluative positions adopted in the mood elements of the responded-to post (Reply).
In other words, all posts are responded to in various ways (even if this response is silence). Those written responses which appear onlist are classed as 'overt responses' and are identified by their reference to a previous post. Within this category of overt response, those responses which actually address the propositional content of the Addressee's contribution, are termed 'replies'.
|
Feb 2002 |
Total No of posts |
Av No posts per persona |
Replies to males |
Replies to females |
Responses to males |
Responses to females |
initiat-ions |
|
(by) 8 males |
93 |
11.6 (SD=4.0) |
45 3.5 |
12 :1 |
9 4.5 |
2 :1 |
11 |
|
(by)7 females |
37 |
5.2 (SD=-2.4) |
12 2 |
6 :1 |
7 |
- |
6 |
Table 2: summary of posts to/by identified as male/female posters: 2/02
|
Feb 1996 |
Total No of posts |
Av No posts per persona |
Replies to males |
Replies to females |
Responses to males |
Responses to females |
initiat-ions |
|
(by) 10 males |
82 |
8.2 (SD=1.5) |
30 |
17 |
5 |
3 |
11 |
|
(by)8 females |
39 |
4.8 (SD=-1.9) |
15 |
7 |
7 |
2 |
4 |
Table 3: summary of posts to/by identified as male/female posters: 2/96
|
Replies as % |
of all posts |
of replies addressed to males |
~ addressed to females |
|
Feb 2002 |
64 |
75 |
24 |
|
Feb 1996 |
56.5 |
65 |
34 |
Table 4: percentage of all Replies / addressed to male/female posters
=============================
The tables above show that, despite there being an almost even number of male: female participants on the list in both February 1996, and February 2002, the males made almost twice as many posts per participating 'persona', with quite large standard deviations for the mean number made by posters in each group. In 1996, this would account perhaps, for the finding that in the replies made by both male and female posters, twice as many were made to males as to females. This might seem to indicate the simple correlative that the more one posts, the more likely it is that responses are made to one's posts. In 2002, however, while the female respondees tended to maintain this 2:1 ratio, the ratio of replies made by males to males is noticeably higher than that made to females: 3.5:1. On the other hand, my conjecture that there would be a higher proportion of responses, as distinct from replies, made to females, was not borne out in this preliminary study. Further, more detailed analysis of the positionings made at micro-level within posts, thereby realising relationships constructed towards the Adressees and audience members overall, are proposed in order to more precisely define the nature of the stances of each group toward the other. The analysis of a larger corpus of running posts is also proposed, as well as a comparative study of posts made over similar periods on the Cybermind list.
By 'analysis of positionings' within posts (response-replies), I mean that the stance of the Addresser towards the propositions and experiential meanings of the Addressee is analysed according to interpersonal meanings and a model of exchange structure influenced by that outlined by Martin (1992: Ch 2), and Eggins and Slade (1997: Ch 5). The main tool for categorising responses is the nature of evaluative positioning revealed by appraisal analysis (White 1998, Martin 2000a and 2000b), and written discourse structure as outlined by Hoey (1983/91 and 2001). Briefly, this means that posts are analysed to determine what speech functions are used in responding to the propositions put forward by Addressers, or indeed by any represented social actors within the text. These references to social actors could be made by reference to other group members, or extra-textual social actors or groups, in order to position the Addresser/Addressee in relation to represented social practices - and therefore can be seen to point to ideological positions (cf van Dijk 1997: 25ff, and van Leeuwen 1996).
=======================
The analysis of responding behaviours within both Responses and Replies are then correlated according Addresser - Addressee gender in order to observe the meta-patterning so produced. While approaching the study from a broadly ethnomethodological perspective, in which interpretation of intersubjective positioning is necessarily based on participant observer status and what/how interactants themselves understand is 'going-on' in any interchange, this research has also been influenced by a view of language in a social semiotic perspective and the Hallidayan framework which sees any interaction as the instantiation of wider and more interrelated social processes.
======================
In terms of Replies, there is a further sub-category of 'replies to elicitations', and these have not been analysed and calculated at this stage. Elicitations are taken to be those posts which contain any move which functions as a question or request for information or action (K2/A2/Dk1/Da1). Such eliciting moves can be further sub-classified depending on whether they (or the posts) are addressed to another specified participant (and thus to the preferred or 'ideal' respondee), or addressed to the audience in general. Further analysis will take account of those elicitations which are responded to in what ways by whom (especially those to which silence is the response), in addition to looking at replies as a general category. Goffman (1981) however, was not specifically interested in the predictive quality of interrogative forms or questions, rather, he maintained that the focus was
" ..that of locating in what is said now the sense of what it is a response to. For the individual who had accepted replying to the original statement will have been obliged to display that he has discovered the meaningfulness and relevance of the statement and that a relevant reaction is now provided…" (p33)
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Part of my overall project is concerned with characterising the semi-regular means (norms of interaction) by which writers within specific discourse communities seem to construct the rhetorical moves that they do, or alternatively, how readers familiar with such semiotic norms, interpret message(s); that is, display that he [sic] has discovered the meaningfulness and relevance of the statement and that a relevant reaction is now provided within sections and sequences of utterances. From this perspective, the recurrent and marked patterns of text organisation become significant for tracing the development of a text's argument or use of positioning in order to construe overall relationships with the various social actors represented in any (set of) text(s). This stems from a view that meanings are more than the sum of a text's individual positionings. This means that, for example, an examination of the number and type of representations of social actors in any text may not reveal their contribution to overall rhetorical functionality of any text as message. This rhetorical functionality is partly construed by such things as taken-for-granted contrasts and correlations between such representations, as well as the placement of these representations in the overall organisation of the texts.
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With respect to the method of analysis adopted, I need to acknowledge that some of the original contextual features of posts have been removed in the interests of brevity. For the purposes of this study, this has sometimes been done in order to show the type of 'exchange structure' which remains after a series of posts have been stripped of their original textuality, and re-presented as text-as-object: contextless as for exact historical location, but re-located as an interchange in an abstract space/time. In most cases, the markers of post boundaries have been maintained, as well as post final salutations, but long quotes of earlier material to which some of the posts respond (rather than reply in the Goffmanian sense used here) have been eliminated if it was felt that they do not contribute to the unfolding of the interactive text, but for example, have instead been appended as residues of technological mediation not necessary to the understanding of the dialogic context. As well, although posts are presented in chronological order, some of the posts which appeared in the original sequence may have been removed in order to concentrate on those more relevant to the representation of gender positions, and/or the development of the thread itself. This means that some posts originally interspersed in the sequence of posts, time-wise, may have been removed since they were not deemed to be part of the thread (in practice, however, except for posts of the 'announcements' type, this is rarely the case on the list in the study: the content of most posts, even if seemingly 'off topic' are in some ways responses to previous and expected contributions).
This study therefore represents part of a project which attempts to combine both synoptic and dynamic aspects of email list interaction.
In this case, the synoptic involves a stylistic analysis of the ways in which certain participants, textual personas or identities, regularly use the mailing list's semiotic resources in order to make contributions. For this purpose, and in a separate related study, I am analysing features of a set of texts written by three different posters to Netdynam, to see what types of languaging are common to all, and distinctive about each - in other words, how does each poster reflect and negotiate group norms and their own styles using the available resources of this mode?
A dynamic perspective aims to be more revealing of the types of interaction which regularly occur - how are contributions managed in a textual, or written medium, which has available a greater degree of process-sharing/interactivity than in other written media? This is the aspect I am addressing in this part of the project, looked at through the lens of gender identification and interpellation.
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