Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis

Over the past fifteen years, the Internet has triggered a boom in research on human behavior. As growing numbers of people interact on a regular basis in chat rooms, web forums, listservs, email, instant messaging environments and the like, social scientists, marketers, and educators look to their behavior in an effort to understand the nature of computer-mediated communication and how it can be optimized in specific contexts of use. This effort is facilitated by the fact that people engage in socially meaningful activities online in a way that typically leaves a textual trace, making the interactions more accessible to scrutiny and reflection than is the case in ephemeral spoken communication, and enabling…