Cybertalk at Work and at Play

Visible Language, 2005 by Baron, Naomi S

Danet's next case study (Chapter 3) analyzes the performance-like character of text in two IRC corpora: the first, a typed simulation of smoking marijuana and the other, a "virtual theatre group" parodying works of Shakespeare. These data were collected in the early half of the 1990s. At that time, users of IRC were still fairly restricted in number, often including people with both technological tenacity and a penchant for zany personal expression. The chapter's title - "Typed Jazz" - reflects Danet's contention that CMC (especially in its more playful forms) "frequently becomes a form of artful, stylized performance, partially resembling both oral performance and improvisational jazz."

In Chapter 4, Danet explores the e-greeting card, a phenomenon that enjoyed considerable success in the late 1990s. Her discussion situates digital greeting cards within the larger historical context of early picture postcards and then the paper greeting-card industry, a fascinating story in its own right. Danet's empirical survey of e-greetings (many of which were initially free) includes birthday cards (the most popular), "love" missives, including valentines (next highest in volume) and cards relating to what she calls "life's troubles," including "sorry" cards, get-well greetings and, indeed, condolences. Why did cyber greetings become so popular? Danet points to the growing move from black-and-white to color in newspaper photographs and advertisements, and from text to multimedia (e.g., the addition of animation, streaming video and sound to many Web sites). Cyber greeting cards can do them all, either pre-packaged from venders or with individual elements selected (or created) by the sender.

Writing in early 2001, Danet predicted that such creative productions would be used "as a matter of course" by "digitally sophisticated children and teenagers, for whom being online is part of everyday life. " Yet by 2004, e-greeting cards seem to be on the decline - at least among the young adults I have informally surveyed. Perhaps the novelty has worn off. More importantly, a number of Internet sites are now charging for their services, making phone calls, emails, instant messages or text messages fiscally reasonable alternatives. And of course, there are still paper cards, which a surprising number of Internet users still prefer to send, perhaps out of nostalgia for the hard-copy universe that seems to be crumbling around us. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life project reported that for the 2001 winter season, sixty-three percent of Internet users physically mailed holiday letters or cards, while only twenty-seven percent sent a holiday card or letter via email._7

Chapters 5 and 6 make up the next case study: a look at ASCII art, starting with its monochromatic beginnings in the 1960s and continuing through the second half of the 1990s, with its transformation into colorful text-based images, sometimes transmitted via Internet Relay Chat. In the early days of computing, a number of bored - but creative - computer devotees, often working late at night in the bowels of university computer facilities, wrote programs for representing displays of ASCII characters. When printed out, these programs formed pictures, often of well-known subjects such as cartoon characters, Christmas trees, political figures or even the Mona Lisa. Danet explains that antecedents of this "constructive" art form include mosaics, "pattern poetry" and typewriter art. In the 1980s and early 90s, with the proliferation of personal computers (with typewriter-style keyboards and modem hook-ups) and widening access to university computer mainframes, the art form found new homes on the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and Usenet newsgroups that thousands of computer geeks began frequenting. Development of the World Wide Web and of expanding computer memory size facilitated the transmission and storage of images. As pictures shifted from black-and-white to dazzling color, the artistic possibilities vastly increased.