'The Sun' newspaper discussion board.
Topic- Entertainment- 'Amy Winehouse'.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/discussions/posts/list/AMY_WHINEHOUSE-23786.page
In this forum, people were all discussing Amy Winehouse and her problems at the moment.
The first thing i noticed was that everyone was using smiley faces. Is this because they were actually smiling while writing it- or because they wanted to put across the idea that they felt this was a funny topic? Im not so sure. I no that people write LOL (laugh out loud) a lot in online conversations. But i very rarely am laughing out loud!
The names people were using were ones like 'Lucy78', 'Casmatch' and 'Corless'. The only one we know anything about is Luct78. Its unlikely that she is 78 years old & know anything about Amy Winehouse, but maybe its her birth year? You can guess some things about her. But then again, how do you know that she is actually called Lucy? Maybe its a man called Bob from Newcastle pretending. You just don't know!!!
From that, i believe that in discussion/message boards, you do not have an identity and you are able to write exactly what you want without feeling any real problem with doing so.
The language used in these were similar to that of a conversation really, with the occasional 'u' instead of 'you'. But then thats what you expect when having a conversation about Amy Winehouse, its something quite modern and informal, so using informal language is expected.
I think online discussion boards are similar to using IM's like MSN, what does everyone else think?
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1 comment:
I think you're right - you can tell more about the identity of the individual online through astute analysis of the context, rather than the name. It's all about subject position really - on a forum about Amy Winehouse, I'd be lost because I know nothing about her - my demographic is unlikely to be heavily represented in this area.
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