"I am going to talk about context first, for the reason that, in real life, contexts precede texts. The situation is prior to the discourse that relates to it."Halliday (1985: 5)
While social activities continue to be defined by the discourses through which they are constituted, the discourses themselves and their resultant 'texts' can only be understood by reference to the social activities in which they are embedded, and whose functions and goals they are shaped to achieve.
Through experience in various contexts we come to be able to predict in some measure what our interlocutors are going to say and how 'meanings' can be made. The almost infinite options available in the semantic network demand that some form of framework be available for speakers/hearers to quickly make sense of what is being said, and the notion of the context of situation helps to secure such predictions and explain how people interact. Meanings are made in the context of the social situation, they are made by members of social groups in the ongoing activities in which they take part. It is this view of context of situation that I want to focus on, and the features of the context of mailing list group culture formation that I wish to describe and interpret from the viewpoint of my own reading position, that of member of this community. Sinclair and Coulthard (1992: 13) note that a consideration of situation is essential for analysts hoping to classify items based on the non-linguistic environment, or the context of culture and situation (see below). In the case of the interaction in this email list, it is felt that participant status is an important contributing factor in deciding what types of 'moves' might be discernible in this context.
Halliday (1985: 44-49) outlines five periods or levels in the text-context continuum. The first is a view of the text itself as a metafunctional construct, that is, the lexicogrammatical realisations of the Field, Tenor and Mode of discourse in operation. These metafunctions are generally known as the experiential, interpersonal and textual, and features of these metafunctions can be discerned across and through texts. They are co-dependent and theoretically inseparable, but for purposes of analysis, formal indicators of these metafunctions may be teased out from any section of text.
The second level that Halliday outlines is the context of situation in which these metafunctions are played out. By examining features of this area it is possible to come close to defining what Hasan (1985) calls a 'contextual configuration'. It is in some ways akin to the 'material' context; the situation in which the discourse occurs, contributing the basic 'glue' for coherence in any text.
With regard to this particular situation, where a community seems to have evolved divorced, as it were, from each participant's 'real life' material context, the ongoing interaction amongst members and its traces in the 'archives', the context of situation takes on a particular significance. New members or 'newbies', are a continual source of discussion fodder, as they often make 'mistakes', introduce topics that have been disposed of already, misinterpret other participants' stance based on limited knowledge of that member's list 'identity' and/or role, or complain that the list is 'exclusive' and unwelcoming to new members even though overt and explicit moves are made on the part of older participants to include them in the 'conversation'.
With this mailing list's discussion in mind, and perhaps other mailing lists as well, what Hasan (op cit) calls the 'material situation' is dramatically split, causing an interesting tension. What is written 'onlist' has its own material context: the context of the ongoing discussion that the participants largely unknown to each other have been having for over a year.
The participants themselves -largely unknown to each other- have their own personal contexts, from which standpoint they read and respond to the others. These become extremely salient to some members who feel the need to know such details about their interlocutors in order to 'place' them and relate to them as more than 'part-objects' (to use a term that has gained currency onlist due to the influence of the psychological orientations/reading positions of several influential list members). I venture to suggest that this tension was a contributing factor in the earlier 'Sig File Wars' (discussions of a heated nature regarding the necessity or repugnance associated with signing each post with a formalised 'signature file', setting out academic credentials and other personal details) we experienced in October 95 at the beginning of list history. This was brought up briefly again in January 96 (from which time and thread I take some of the data I will later discuss in terms of the interpersonal metafunction of the text, and as an example of units in a tentative rank scale of 'exchange structure' pertinent to email discussion list behaviour). This tension has also contributed to the occasional outbursts of what have become known as 'AFFinity' posts (as contrasted with purely CONtent-based or topic/work-centred material), and the matter of pseudoanonymity in posting.
Other factors contributing to the context of situation that pertain especially to mailing list interaction is the previously mentioned absence of F2F cues, a feature of the technological constraints under which discussion is conducted. Another even more 'material' consideration associated with this is of course the deferred nature of the communication. The technology associated with a mailing list allows a person to be 'subscribed' to a list in a variety of ways, one of which is 'digest' form where the day's posts are sent to the subscriber in one bundle, once a day. This means that real time interaction for those subscribers is almost impossible, unless they wish to communicate 'backchannel' or one-to-one. Other participants who happen to be logged on at the same time have sometimes reported strange feelings of exhilaration when they first experienced sending a post and receiving a response from one of the participants within minutes. So the lack of contact with other members is heightened in this medium and sometimes leads to misunderstandings and the phenomenon of 'projection' (which again is part of list lexicon due to influence of psychological perspectives which will be touched upon in the following section). Interaction is 'deferred' in time and space.
In the case of most literature and written traces of communicative efforts, the text is preserved in amber, so to speak - writers and readers are at one remove, although writers will probably have some conception of who their audience will be. This is unlike mailing list interaction in that messages are going to be read by all those who are subscribed to the list, and also in that one hopes that one's contribution will elicit some form of response. Traditionally, letters have been generally penned for one-to-one consumption, and both writer and reader have a fair knowledge of their interlocutor's 'material situation' beyond the letter-writing arena, whereas this is not necessarily the case with mailing lists; messages of 'affinity' are the exception rather than the norm on some of the more academic lists, or those whose field of interaction is more closely associated with 'information exchange' rather than group dynamics, which the list in the study has as its focus.
For each individual poster, of course, the context of situation is more objectively described as that of sitting in front of a monitor and typing one's thoughts onto the screen via a keyboard, then connecting through a telephone and a modem to a distant computer.
Halliday's third level of context is that of the 'context of culture'. Describing the context of culture as it applies to this mailing list is again problematic. One way of viewing it is to make a type of lowest common denominator description of the typical listmember, who is usually a native speaker of English (although amongst participants there have been at least two active members who were not), has undergone some form of tertiary education, is white, middle class, and obviously computer literate. Most of the active participants are American, so the flavour of the discussion and mores often manifest assumptions based on membership of American culture, and this has indeed contributed to some misinterpretations of interpersonal behaviour. Discussion is to some degree male dominated, although the women participants sometimes create threads based on gender and solidarity issues.
Another view of the culture of situation is to see the list culture as a construct of its own, based on the history and discussions which have taken place, and through which norms of interaction have been 'decided' or negotiated. It is obvious that both these aspects contribute to overall list culture, and that the misunderstandings and problems associated with newcomers touched on above, stem directly from a lack of knowledge of this culture.
The notion of intertextuality is the third level in this cycle, and is closely linked to both context of situation and context of culture. The topics of the discussions, what has gone down in list history as kept in the archives, the cycles of thread topics, the valued Discourses which have figured in these discussions and which reflect to a great degree those social identities which participants bring to the list as information and opinion that should be valued, all figure here.
This aspect of the context is most closely associated with the field of the interaction, the ideational and experiential metafunction, and for that reason, a discussion of the list's valued texts and Discourses follows.
Besides the raw archival material that is sometimes referred to, there are a number of list specific texts which figure in defining list context. The most significant one may be the 'welcome message' that arrives in every new subscriber's mailbox, and which is sometimes jokingly referred to as 'the mission statement'. This is kept permanently on the web page dedicated to the list <http://www.iquest.net/~rwinkler/netdynam.htm> and is maintained by one of the members. It was reposted once a month under the title 'Netdynam Masthead', as a way of reminding members and newcomers of what may be read as the list 'constitution'. It occasionally becomes fodder for debate and reflects the fact that the list was started by a psychologist whose interests lay in group dynamics and the way these could be played out 'online' (Appendix 1: valued texts: 1.). The original welcome message referred specifically to the Tavistock model of group dynamics whose chief exponent is Wilfred Bion. Consequently, many of the discussions have used terms and concepts specifically related to this Discourse. (cf; Appendix 2: Ba states: excerpts from Bion's 'Experiences in Groups')
Because the list initially attracted many practicing psychologists and psychiatrists, knowledge of the works of such writers as Freud, Jung and Klein is necessary to follow some of the threads that have appeared. Another recurring debate has centred on the way the medium operates and how interaction can be conceived and manipulated. One of the list specific texts that is often referred to is what has come to be known as 'The Big Six', a set of six strategies that participants should employ in order to get the needed response to a message (Appendix 1: 2.). This was devised by one of the listmembers. Jargon, in-jokes and list specific use of metaphor are also apparent in discussions and there is a partial listing of these under the title 'The Grumpy Glossary' (Appendix 1: 3) also maintained at the web page cited above. As part of a conference presentation on the dynamics of this list, a typology of characters was compiled by one of the members (Appendix 1: 5: 'Netdynam cast of characters').
One other paradigm that has always figured in list negotiations over 'norms' is that of what constitutes appropriate material (on topic/ off topic) for posting. Early in list history this negotiation was carried on under the dichotomy CONtent versus AFFinity. Some participants felt that message content be restricted to material relevant to the discussion of an ideational nature, in effect, to an exchange of 'information' about list dynamics. Another camp felt that messages that revealed an 'affect' component was also relevant to list discussion as the nature of each poster's personal opinion, background, identity, social orientation and the 'feelings' raised by interaction onlist was a necessary factor in the dynamics of group formation. For some time, it was agreed that subject lines should be preceded by the tags AFF or CON to alert members as to the likely content of the message. These terms have now entered list lexicon, and occasionally still appear on new messages.
One of the participants devised a set of topics or material that he deemed the list was willing to see posted (cf Appendix 4: exchanges: 'ND self study and boundaries'). Posting material of a personal nature (the so-called AFFinity posts) has raised issues of privacy and identity onlist, and caused at least two rather significant upheavals during list history in which litigation was either threatened or involved. Indeed, one of the subtitles originally considered for this paper was 'Mailing List As Soap Opera', and in many respects, membership of this list allows one to participate in, or observe as a 'lurker' the unfolding drama of the characters which one may 'project' into the roles assumed and responded to in a wholly graphic and ascii-bound medium.
The final area of context outlined by Halliday (op cit) is that of Coherence, and this refers to the actual relations obtaining between parts of the text(s) themselves at the level of discourse. This is the level of the lexicogrammatical relations between the words in any 'utterance'. Utterances/sentences are constructed (usually) according to these 'logical' relations. If they aren't, they are foregrounded for some purpose, and become rather more obvious elements of 'style', rather than another example of an acceptable utterance in context. The term 'frames of coherence' that I wish to introduce, relates to this level of the context of interaction.
This brings the text back to the dimension metafunctional construct, as each text represents a configuration of these metafunctions in achieving some purpose or goal in context.
The selection of lexicogrammatical features from the semantic network in order to achieve this purpose must be done with the context in mind, the writer obviously hoping that his/her intent will be retrievable (or sometimes not). While this is ultimately not possible, readers do make interpretations based on their own experiences of participants and processes within the community in which the text appears.
Because this particular type of community is reliant on words and messages in order to come to an understanding of the community in which they are participating, the formal features of the lexicogrammar become salient for determining what is acceptable, or what is 'truth' and 'reality' as Hodge and Kress (1988) might have it.