Baym Ch. 3 and Baxter & Braithwaite Ch. 29

Chapter three of Baym's book, on communication in digital spaces, and chapter 29 of Baxter & Braithwaite, on Social Information Processing Theory, are the first readings of this class that I have immediately and unquestioningly found myself agreeing with, almost completely.  I am a long time 'netizen', in the words of some digital communication scholars.  I first started exploring the Internet when I was about 9 or 10, back in elementary school.  Over time, my patterns of use, and amount of use, have waxed and waned depending on a variety of independent factors.  At this point, I am less engrossed in exclusively-online social situations than I have been before, but I still spend a lot more time on the internet than most of my peers.  The exact number of hours per day (at least ones that are not devoted to online schoolwork) is hard to determine and varies from day to day, but usually during school it's around 2-3 hours per day on weekdays, about 5 on weekends, and a truly incredible amount during vacations when I have no work - sometimes as many as 8 or 10.  I read webcomics, I watch media, I read blogs, I post on Facebook, I read and look at fan works (both art and fiction) for the media I'm interested in, and many more things I am not quite sure how to describe.  What I don't do very often right now is post on online forums, but I used to, mostly creative play-by-post role playing (a type of communal story-creating where each person controls one character and their interactions drive the plot).  But I used to, and it was usually with people I didn't know in person in the least, people in Florida, New England, the UK, Texas - people years older than me, people from different social classes than me, people I never would have met without the Internet.  And though I had friends 'irl' as well, the relationships I had with my writing partners online were many of them very close.  We shared photos of ourselves, personal information, and at times had serious, genuine emotional discourse.  After a while, I ceased having time for such activity, and I haven't contacted them much since then, but I know that the group I was part of stays in online contact.  They have each other's phone numbers, they consult each other in crisis, and they've even met in person a few times.  Their relationship, conducted via the Internet across borders of state and even country, was as close as those of any friends who might have met in person.  They trusted each other.  So I can say without question that I believe in the power of digital communication to bring people together in a genuine way, rather than pushing them apart - I've witnessed it, and even experienced it, myself.

The other point that intrigued me, showing up mostly in Baym, was the idea of reproducing verbal/nonverbal cues through an exclusively textual setting by playing with font, effect, color, html, and even grammar, as exemplified in lolcats, among other memes.  Baym suggests that this activity may help create immediacy in SMS and IM conversations, rather than being merely a symptom of sloth or lack of grammatical knowledge on the part of the communicators.  Initially when I started using the Internet, texting, etc., I was obsessed in my pursuit of correct grammar and spelling in all my posts and interactions online.  However, as time has passed, I've found myself more and more slipping on this - not using periods, capitalization, sometimes abbreviating words arbitrarily, etc.  I use emoticons to express feelings when my actual facial expression can't, and I use italics, bold, and caps lock to indicate tone of voice where there is none.  The use of these tricks to create artificial immediacy and flow, and to display personality, is something I really enjoy doing.  Outside of chat, I've even seen it done in webcomics.  One comic I read in particular uses these tricks to great effect.  The main characters spend much of the plot physically separate from one another, communicating solely through instant messaging chat clients.  To tell them apart, in long conversations shown solely through chat logs, each character types using a distinct style and color - some with punctuation, some without, some with capitalization, some without, some always typing in caps, etc.  The individual style in which each character types not only distinguishes them from one another, it also conveys distinct personality styles and vocal qualities where there are none (for example, a character with a lisp who replaces his 's's with '2's when he types).  The idea that these quirks can be used to express immediacy and personality, rather than laziness, is something I'd been trying to put words to for some time, and reading these Baym and B&B chapters was very helpful for me in this way.