Introduction
More than twenty-five years ago the New Yorker published a cartoon by Peter Steiner with the caption âOn the internet nobody knows youâre a dogâ which became both an adage and a meme that summarised internet anonymity and online behaviours. The assumption behind the statement is that while internet protocols may identify users, web connections and mediated technologies provide people with opportunities to play with, exaggerate, or even fabricate characteristics and identities. The potential for this to be dangerous is underscored with the image and textâafter all, the person on the other end of the computer may not even be human. This metaphor draws on fear but can alternatively highlight the potentially liberatory effect that is seemingly inherent in the notion that ânobody knowsâ. Either interpretation requires differentiating between online and offline social contexts. This separation is at once artificial and absurd for multiple generations who have come to age with (and on) the internet, and it creates a binary between the two in which one side envisages technological futures as enabling new patterns of social behaviours, relationships, and organisation, while the other views those same developments as constraining people and their interaction. Such a binary emphasises technology at the expense of individuals, infrastructures, and social practice, presuming that the form, function, and structure of language use in general, but especially in technologically mediated contexts, exists beyond and outside of hegemonic discourses that perpetuate structural inequalities.
In Online Sex Talk and the Social World, I analyse how people in the online community of Walford, a multi-user domain (MUD) that is socially focused but is not sexual in its scope or purpose, talk about sex, sexuality, and desire in order to make sense of their relationships, their community, broader social structures, and discourses of gender and sexuality. In order to do this, I examine their language use and relate covert language patterns to manifestations of power in online talk. Steinerâs cartoon has been in the back of my mind in the years that I have researched and studied this topic, with earnest colleagues asking, âBut how can you tell that these people really are who they are online?â My interest, I hope I have made clear, is not in evaluating how people present themselves in one interactional context and comparing it to another, but in analysing how participants in a specific synchronous chat community use language in this conversational context to discuss sex, sexuality, and desire. I then apply those findings to contextualise the role that this talkâand gender and sexuality discoursesâplays in how people realise and constitute their social worlds.
The conversations that are analysed in this book are from an online community that is structured through text to represent an English village. This text-based village was created in the mid-1990s, and people from all around the world connect to the platform to synchronously chat with others in various locations or âroomsâ in the virtual town. During the time period when this data was drawn, there were approximately 1500 regular monthly users and an average of more than 300 people connected each day. Advancements in technology have rendered entirely text-based MUDs like Walford nearly obsolete, but their legacy lives on in popular multimodal massively multiplayer online games such as Fortnite, World of Warcraft, and Black Desert Online.
While there are conventions that govern all language use and some topics and conversations are both regulated and ritualised (e.g., greetings), sequestered topics are those that are generally removed from the public sphere or have high levels of constraints governing how people approach them. This is to say that these are the areas of human experience that require an extraordinary amount of âcommunicative competenceâ (c.f. Hymes 1972) to effectively navigate. Communicative competence addresses four questions of language use that range from the theoretical to the social: is an utterance formally possible; is it feasible; is it appropriate in the context; and finally, is it actually done? Hymes (1972: 282) gives an example of how a speaker may produce a sentence that âmay be grammatical, awkward, tactful and rareâ depending on how they address these four questions and combine their knowledge with their use of language. Both the third and fourth questions relate to the sociocultural world but in different ways. The third question relates to tacit knowledge about linguistic and cultural appropriateness. The fourth question attempts to further contextualise things by forcing a reckoning of sorts: a statement may be grammatical, it may be feasible, it may be appropriate, but does anyone actually say it? This is the area where speakers account for norms, probabilities, and responses. Speakers may think through issues of who they can raise a topic with, what they can discuss, the ways they can discuss it, where it can be brought up, how it can be introduced, and so on. None of this knowledge is innate or universal; speakers rely on the people around them and the interaction they are participating in and observing to develop this situational competence. Throughout our lives, we interact with some people who flout norms and conventions about what topics to talk about, with whom, and in what settings, and with others who seem to effortlessly know and navigate the limits of language and discourse that children are taught from the time they first learn to speak, often through disavowals that police their perceived transgressions (e.g., donât ask that, donât say that, apologise for saying that) and provide them with notions about the boundaries of the âsayableâ.
Coming at this from a different direction, but arriving at roughly the same place, the sociologist Giddens (1986, 1991) develops a theory that arguably explores wider aspects of communicative competence. He proposes that there is a dualistic social system in which people (agents) develop memory traces of rules and resources (structures) that inform what they are knowledgeable to socially act upon. These memory traces are in three areas which will be familiar to discourse analysts and linguistic anthropologists: power, meaning, and norms. The areas that are sequestered require significant memory traces because these are fields of human experience that are often moralised or raise existential questions: criminality, mental illness, sickness, death, and sexuality. On one hand, these areas are treated as âprivateâ, yet on the other there is a great deal of state involvement that governs how people are permitted (and in which circumstances, settings, and permutations) to âdoâ them. Foucault (1998) wrote about sexuality, mental illness, and criminality and how some discourses, forms of knowledge, and âtruthsâ become authoritative, while others are silenced. It is possible to look within language research for examples of how this informal social regulation occurs. For example, another cultural theorist, Sontag (2013), examines the rich metaphorical language embedded in the discussion of illnesses, including cancer. One of her main points was that the discussion of cancer is laden with battle metaphors, such as references to fight, battle, and loss. She argues that the rhetorical language that constructs cancer as a battleground is not the same for other illnesses and contrasts this with the euphemistic language used for tuberculosis and AIDS. The association of cancer with battle runs deep: in everyday linguistic practice, speakers refer to a third-partyâs cancer as a âcourageous battleâ or âvaliant fightâ and discuss the disease as something that was either âwonâ or âlostâ. These war metaphors, working alongside adjectives that position the human agent as a soldier, construct both the illness and the person with cancer as different from other illnesses and those with those other illnesses or conditions (e.g., ALS, diabetes, hepatitis C). Medical linguists researching cancer metaphors continue to find that conversations about cancer are structured around violence and battle metaphors (e.g., Semino et al. 2017a, b). Thus, these âmemory tracesâ of how certain illnesses are constructed are not internally based or individualistic but are themselves culturally ingrained, dominant discourses with legacies of their own. Whether coming at this from a perspective that values communicative competence or one that places primacy on the constitution of society, the result is the same: issues of power, meaning, and norms help speakers to decide what to linguistically or socially act upon and that even within the same broad topical area speakers may need to engage in a great deal of work.
Euphoric Internet Culture
This book is situated in an internet culture that no longer exists. If the first phase of internet culture was the scientific, pre-commercial text-based period prior to the development of the World Wide Web in 1993, then the second phase was the âeuphoric, speculative periodâ in which the internet became widely available (Lovink 2013: 7). Replacing the second phase was one characterised by increased immersion and surveillance. Text-based MUDs, such that which is examined in this book, blurred those first two phases by being pre-commercial and text-based at the same time as they were also emblematic of the creative, speculative middle ages of the internet. Wellmanâs (2004) assessment of this transition period of internet culture uses figurative language such as similes and metaphors to characterise it:
The internet was seen as a bright light, shining above everyday concerns. It was a technological marvel, thought to be bringing a new Enlightenment to transform the world. Communication dominated the internet, by asynchronous email and discussion lists and by synchronous instant messaging and chat groups. All were supposedly connected to all, without the boundaries of time and space. (Wellman 2004: 124)
While there is a critique of naivety in Wellmanâs description of this period, it is not without nostalgia for the playfulness that came with it. This playful aspect of mid-internet culture, emphasised in the notion that people were afforded the ability to transcend time and space, and that technology was a democratising force free from the constraints of power relations, is echoed elsewhere. For example,...