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Electronic Discourse Linguistic Individuals in Virtual Space 1997 217 pages Complementary Texts Donna Haraway Keywords Identity and Subject formation Copyright © 2000-2007 Isabel Pedersen |
Davis and Brewer examine the corpus of an interactive conference and provide a discourse analysis of their findings. The electronic conference takes place in a highly controlled manner. A number of students are required to participate in a discussion of newspaper articles with students in their own class, others classes and other classes on separate campuses. They are not wholly anonymous. The writers argue that electronic conference discourse
is not a genre, but an emergent register that is different from electronic
messaging or email communication. They spend a great of space outlining the
way that this register aligns itself with neither written nor oral
communication, but a combination of the two resulting in something different
and new. They use the metaphor of chiming to explain the
way that the students interact with each other and use emulation and
repetition to communicate within the conference. One “chimes in” to respond to
ongoing discussion. Davis and Brewer state that “a chime of bells is a
repetitive, recursive patterning; to chime in is an act that aligns the new
ringer of chimes within the overall pattern discerned, hypothesized,
projected (137). Overall, it is a very thorough analysis of the
beginnings of a register. |