How is online language different from face-to-face language, and how is the enormous popularity of social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook affecting how we communicate?

With the explosion of the internet there has been a lot of interest in the types of communications which occur in online communities. Language use in computer mediated communication (CMC) shares many linguistic features typically found in written language, such as punctuation and capitalization, while attempting to incorporate information common in casual face-to-face spoken communication (FFC), such as prosodic marking and subject and copula omission ( Cherny 1999, Herring 1996, 2005). Dialogue participants are creative in their use of different paralinguistic communication tools such as emoticons like <:> suggesting positive associations, and acronyms like <LOL> for 'laughing out loud'. While use of these strategies helps lessen communicative differences between FFC and CMC by attempting to make written communication seem like speech, electronically mediated conversations have often been analyzed as exhibiting fewer social norms than have face to face encounters occurring in real time (Brennan and Ohaeri 1999). Typically this is attributed to the lack of physical co-presence in CMC. Conversation participants are considered to be less socially responsible and more de-personalized in non-face-to-face communications. They are more individual in their interactions and behave less like socially responsible members of a community. However, determining what constitutes a community in CMC is somewhat problematic since most claims rely on subjective assessments, either of the researchers or of the participants.

In this talk I present an analysis of CMC discourse interactions among participants in a conversation-like CMC system. Data for the study comes from samples of on-line conversations over a six-month period from different online message boards occurring within a large multi-national organization. Although the topics for the boards are discrete and unrelated, several participants post to more than one board. I present evidence that participants in the different message board systems use non-standard written linguistic features which suggest more casual, face-to-face-like interactions. These include omission of pronouns and copulas, non standard punctuation such as <!!>, <@?@>, stylistics including emphasis markers such as *really* and capitalization to indicate YELLING. Using a Social Network Analysis framework I show that participants who exhibit the most frequent uses of non-standard linguistic features are those system users who have the most dense social networks within the online community in which they are posting. That is, they have links to several other participants in the system either through other on-line communications or through face-to-face communication. Extending the results of Kelly and Halverson (2003) I show that several users who have dense relationships with other users in one message board and use non-standard linguistic features in this system exhibit little use of non-standard language in their postings on other bulletin boards in which they do not have such dense social networks.

This work presents a promising approach for confirming the classification of online discourse communities via their linguistic behavior and their relationships as determined through a social network analysis.