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99 6 The Medium Is the Metamessage Conversational Style in New Media Interaction DEBORAH TANNEN Georgetown University Introduction IN 1981 I ORGANIZED the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics “Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk.” In my introduction to that volume (Tannen 1982a, ix) I explain that I regard “text” and “talk” not as two separate entities—text as written language and talk as spoken—but rather as “overlapping aspects of a single entity”: discourse. I suggested, moreover, that the word “discourse” is invaluable as a corrective to the tendency to think of spoken and written language as separate and fundamentally different. Research by many of the participants in that meeting supported this view. Bright (1982) showed that spoken discourse exhibits verse markers like those associated with written poetry, and Chafe (1982) demonstrated that spoken Seneca rituals contain many features of written language. In my own research (for example, Tannen 1982b), while ostensibly focusing on spoken and written discourse as well as on orality and literacy, I emphasize that the division is illusory. I suggest that we think instead of oral and literate strategies that are found in speaking or writing. Another major thread of my research has been analyzing everyday conversation. Early on I developed the notion of “conversational style,” whereby speakers think they are simply saying what they mean and accomplishing interactional goals, but in doing so they necessarily choose among many options for each of the full range of linguistic phenomena such as pitch, amplitude, length of pauses, rate of speech, intonational contours, relative directness versus indirectness, discourse structure, and humor. These relatively automatic choices differ according to numerous cultural in- fluences. I have tended to emphasize five primary influences: ethnicity, geographical background, age, class, and gender, while noting that there are innumerable other in- fluences on style, such as sexual orientation and profession. I have shown, furthermore , that features of conversational style function to communicate not only messages—the meaning of words—but also metamessages—indications of how speakers intend what they say and what they are trying to do by saying those words in that way in that context. These two research threads—on one hand, examining spoken and written language , and on the other, analyzing everyday conversation—converge in the discourse of new media.1 Email, texting, Gchat, IM, SMS, Facebook, and other types of digital media discourse are widely understood to be written conversation. (For support of this point see Herring 2010.) In this chapter I build on and reinforce this view by demonstrating that the discourse of digital media interaction is characterized by written linguistic phenomena analogous to those I have identified as constituting conversational style in spoken interaction. I show, furthermore, that metamessages are conveyed in electronic interaction not only through the forms of discourse used but also through the choice of medium itself. I hope thus to contribute to an understanding of how new media interaction works, and how it affects interpersonal relationships. A subtext of my argument is a response to the widespread the-sky-is-falling alarm with which many older Americans have responded to young people’s use of social media. I join Thurlow (2006) and Crystal (2008), among others, in pointing out that much of what is being done by young people using new media is not, as their elders often perceive and fear, fundamentally different from what has always been done with language in social interaction. But doing the same old thing in new ways can also present new challenges. One such challenge posed by new media is that the potential metamessages one must take into account increase as the number and type of media platforms among which one must choose proliferate. Moreover, interpreting new media metamessages is especially challenging because media ideologies, as Gershon (2010) demonstrates, are emergent and continually evolving, and they tend to vary greatly not only from one user group to another but also among users in ostensibly the same social groups. Overview In what follows I begin by defining the term “metamessage” and explaining how I use it. I then explain and illustrate the linguistic phenomena that constitute conversational style in spoken interaction, with emphasis on the contrast between what I have dubbed “high-involvement” and “high-considerateness” styles. Next I explain how I first came to see parallels between regional differences in spoken conversational style and generational differences in digital discourse style, leading to the metaphoric characterization of cross-generational new media interaction as a kind...

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