Naming Virtual Space in Computer-Mediated Conversation

New technologies expand our ability to communicate by providing new channels for communication, but at the same time they create contexts of interaction far removed from the paradigm of face-to-face interaction. Communication media separate the location or time of message production from that of message reception. One consequence of this separation is to allow users the simultaneous experience of two separate environments: "the physical environment in which one is actually present and the environment presented by the medium" (Steuer, 1992, p. 75). The latter is telepresence, or the experience of a media-based environment; it is our sense of the space inhabited by telephone conversations or electronic mail exchanges. Gozzi (1994) has shown how the spatial metaphor of "cyberspace" is used in talk about new communication technology; this essay is concerned with spatial language in talk within new communication technology. In this analysis I examine how participants in computer-mediated communication (CMC) adapt their descriptions of location and spatial relationships to the constraints of online conversations, with particular attention to role of language in the creation and use of telepresence. Synchronous or "chat" mode CMC is a form of interactive written discourse that approximates the temporal condition of face-to-face conversation, since message production and reception are more nearly simultaneous (limited, of course, by user typing speed and network lag times ranging from imperceptible to maddening). In the commercial computer networks that are the sources of the talk examined here, messages are displayed at each user's terminal in the order they are received by the network's central exchange. The network places the user name (or "handle") of the sender before each message. Each message is displayed in its entirety before the next message is displayed. In most networks there are multiple lines or channels, and users may switch from channel to channel to converse with different groups of users. Synchronous CMC services are offered by commercial networks such as America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. A similar non-commercial service is available through Internet Relay Chat (IRC; see Reid, 1991). An excerpt of a synchronous computer-mediated conversation is displayed in example 1 (user handles have been replaced with letters in all multi-message examples and are omitted in single-message examples). 1. (A) are rates changing? (B) Hmmmnmmm... (C) u and flo switch accounts again? (D) that is cuz Ari is a star! (E) All the time. (F) Flos acct, CHox...for party club Place Reference in Face-to-Face Interaction Deictic or "pointing" expressions reference person, place, time, social status, or discourse relative to some other point (Nunberg, 1993). Typically, the point of reference, or deictic center, is based on the assumption that the central person is the speaker, the central time is utterance time, and the central place is the speaker's location at utterance time (Levinson, 1983). For example, deictic terms such as "front," "back," "up," "down," "here," and "there" define spatial relationships relative to the speaker's current location and orientation (Garnham, 1989). Deictic references that use some other center will specify it; for example, "behind that door," or "above the desk." Communication technologies alter the degree to which the unmarked deictic center is shared and obvious to participants in a conversation. In telephone conversations we share utterance time but not speaker location; users of electronic mail share neither location nor utterance time. In the case of real-time computer-mediated conversation, users are physically separated but share utterance time. The challenge for users is to formulate unambiguous place references that reflect their physical separation yet copresence in the network's conversation service. The solution is conventional place deixis in reference to physical location, and shared formulation of the network itself as a space for references to conversational copresence. …