4. EXAMPLE TEXT AND OUTLINE OF ITS CONTEXT

The following post was selected in as arbitrary way as possible while still retaining a relevance to the need to tease out some of the features of this medium, and the specific context of this list. In July 1996, two days' digests were selected from January 96. These were amended so that all names were removed from the text. This was in response to a suggestion that a textual analysis of a sequence of posts from some period of list history sufficiently removed from present concerns as to render the context of situation at the time non retrievable through the office of normal memory, would reveal patterns of interaction that might be correlated with similar patterns derived from other Discourse orientations prevalent in list discussions of group behaviour (to wit, those of Tavistockian group dynamics and the work of the psychologist Wilfred Bion, and that of Jungian personality types as revealed by such methods as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (a version used to be available on the web, but has now been taken down for copywrite reasons). These were sent to three volunteers from among list participants.(ratings are included in Appendix 2: sig files thread, and related comments in Appendix 3: Ba states)

For the purposes of this study, I selected the thread with the most posts, then took one from the middle of the thread (post number 7 in a sequence of 15) which happened to show features of signalling that attempt to position the audience/writer.

Try this quick quiz: assume you are a 'newbie' and that this is the first message that arrives in your mailbox after you have subscribed. How would you attempt to recontextualise the post?

What features of the text would allow you to determine what gave rise to this message, and what role the writer takes in relation to previous participants' contributions? How does the writer position himself in relation to these other readers <offstage> and the participants to whom he addresses his comments directly? What response to the post would you assume occurs as a follow up to this post? What are the likely content and writer positions of other posts in the thread?

MAIN TEXT EXAMPLE

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If this post is considered as an 'utterance', marked, at the first rank by its own boundaries, these may be easily identified by the forms inherent in the technology, or the interface itself. These forms have almost come to be recognised as conventions, and realise part of the textual metafunction. Other conventions on the borderline between the textual and the interpersonal can also be distinguished by typological forms.

A message is always preceded by a 'header' which identifies the list name and address (deleted in the examples), the time the message was sent, the name of the person, or at least, the email address of the person who sent it, and importantly, the subject of the message. If the message is part of a thread, then the convention, again, partly to do with the technology, is that the same subject heading under which preceding messages appeared is used, prefaced by 'Re:' Listmembers know before opening the message what it is about, and who is making the post. New topics or those addressing a new topic are easily distinguished (these may be considered as broadly 'initiating' type posts).

Closing the message is usually done with a 'signature', the person signals that they have completed the message by writing their name or handle in a certain way that becomes typical for that person. (7). Occasionally a 'sig file' is appended, and this usually shows the person's email address and web site address or some affiliation. Occasionally it incorporates some quotation.(7.1) This appears, again due to the technology inherent in the mailer, after the signature. It serves to identify the poster.

Posts themselves, may be broadly considered as realising Initiation and/or Response -type contributions, or utterances. While each message is separate, the actual exchanges may typically be carried out within the message itself. This means that one post cannot be seen as one part of an exchange, and it may be more useful to consider it as a contribution to a 'transaction' within the boundaries of the 'thread' (or 'conversation' in more conventional terms).

Within the 'body' of the message, several exchanges may usually be identified. The first is usually a type of boundary exchange, or opening sequence, which sets up the 'frame' or transitional relevance for the post. Because of the 'multilogue' character of the interaction, some type of opening or reframing move seems to be necessary: even if messages in a thread may be identified by the use of the subject line in the header, each participant responds to different parts of a variety of previous posts within threads, so that readers need to be given information about what is being responded to, in whose previous post.

Within posts there may be several 'exchanges'. The boundaries between such 'exchanges' are normally marked by typological features, most obviously by a line of white space. Another feature of the medium is the use of the chevron '>' to indicate that a quotation is being used. In the case of a double chevron '>>' we are to understand that the piece quoted has been quoted itself at one remove in the main quotation (see 4.3 above).

As well as typological features, the structure of a message seems to be marked by certain linguistic realisations. The opening sequence (which cannot be usefully seen as an exchange as it typically involves a contribution by the poster only) seems to be realised by one or more of four types of 'act': Greeting, where the poster makes some sort of salutation; Nominating, in which reference to a previous poster whose words are to be quoted and commented upon is made in a short sentence, sometimes of subject and finite only (for example, 'Steve sez:'); Quoting, where the relevant parts of another post is quoted; and Setting, in which a new post is 'framed' for the readers in some other way, especially if the post initiates a new topic (as distinct from response to a previous message). Setting might be alternatively labelled 'focus'. Some of these opening sequences do not explicitly make a greeting or name a person they intend to quote. Therefore, it is probably better to see greeting, naming, quoting as realising types of act within the framing/opening sequence, and 'setting' as a distinct 'move' type If the opening sequence involves a setting move, however, it is possible that it performs several different functions (see below: Setting) In the example above, the framing sequence is realised by nomination (2), followed by quoted material (2.1). In this example, the quoted material is followed by a comment (3). Comments are usually made as the beginning of the next exchange, realising a long move, but in this case, the function of the comment at (3) is to complete the framing/opening sequence, and reframe. The stage is set for what is to come.

The opening sequence, or 'boundary frame' as I will now call it, can now be seen to have this basic structure: (greet)//(nominate)/(quote)//(setting).//(comment)

It can be seen that all of these are semantic labels, that all are optional, and that there is no definite sequence (double slashes '//' indicating that items are not sequential), although nomination usually precedes quoting. Therefore it may be better to conceive of such a sequence as having a two-part structure, with greet, nominate, and quote, types of acts within an optional marker unit, and setting as another optional move realised by several possible acts (outlined below). Conventionally, however, one of these moves usually occurs to realise a boundary frame. A post without one of these moves at the beginning would be seen as 'marked'.

Within posts, phase shifts of the type outlined by Berry (1981) can be discerned. Readers tend to use 'intuitive' clues in order to interpret 'what is going on' in a post, or in a series of posts....but where do these clues originate?

Conversational moves by speakers can be seen as reflecting positions of a 'primary Knower' (K1) and 'secondary Knower' (K2), OR 'primary Actor' (A1) and 'secondary Actor' (A2).

This separation of moves into possible action-encoding or information/knowledge-encoding moves seem to be related to the dichotomy: proposal/ proposition maintained by Halliday (1994: 70), who notes that while proposals involve an exchange of goods and services, propositions refer to information which has no real existence except in the form of language. Propositions encode viewpoints which can then be argued about, affirmed, denied, accepted, qualified, negotiated. It seems likely that in email list interaction, most of the moves will be of the propositional type, and will involve statements that are contentious in some way so that responses will be forthcoming (cf above p. 13).

In reading transcriptions, analysts apparently have tended to look for linguistic cues in order to define conversational acts as falling into one of the aforementioned 4 categories: the person who had the knowledge to impart, or who was in the position of being able to transfer information, for example, would be labelled K1. An asker, or receiver of information, K2. Someone telling someone to DO something, A1. These acts are encoded in the lexicogrammar via selection of mood, modality, transitivity processes and other indicators. Within mailing list discussion of the type found on Netdynam, those features of the interpersonal metafunction as reflected in indicators of modality and markers of affinity seem to have become the most salient. (See Appendix 5: Analysis of some opening and closing sequences, for examples).

There seems to be some shifting towards looking at reader processes in all this as the only true indicator of 'uptake'; readers respond to posts according to their own experiences of a set of Discourses. If the matrix between writer and reader discourse experiences does not fit, then misunderstandings are likely to occur.1

Active participants, that is, those who regularly write and respond to messages, have only other participants' responses to their posts by which to determine whether they have made their point or not. On the other hand, as has been mentioned previously, a non response, (or 'Ignore' see below) while undesirable, may actually indicate compliance, acquiescence or agreement. The reason for this seems to be that other participants are unlikely to break prevalent list norms by posting 'me too' messages of support, unless they can also add to the discussion in some way. Occasionally, very contentious or 'flaming' posts are actively ignored, in order to prevent 'flame wars'. Occasionally, such efforts to 'freeze out' 'flames' or overly contentious posts/posters, are engineered backchannel, and so it has to be said that non responses or 'Ignores' are genuine responses, but that for the purposes of this study, there is no trace of them in the public discussion, and so they cannot be taken into account for the present time. However, occasionally, when a response is overtly solicited to which no one replies, the original poster makes mention of it in another post. In such a case, the non response becomes something which is actually responded to, and becomes part of the data. The mechanisms behind such posting behaviour will need to be taken up in another study.

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