Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World

Conversation and Community: Discourse in a Social MUD is an examination of the Speech community in an Internet "virtual community". Based on ethnographic research on a community of users of a MUD. or "multi-user dimension", the book describes a closeknit community united in features of their language use, shared history, and relationships to other online communities. Routines, conventional vocabulary, and abbreviations, syntactic and semantic phenomena, and special turn-taking and repair strategies distinguish the MUD community's register. Discussion of methods and ethics for online research are included.