Discussion Questions for Herring & Androutsopoulos

  1. The authors discuss how certain medium characteristics affect interaction management, including the lack of visual cues and one-way vs. two-way transmission. How do synchronous or asynchronous exchanges affect interaction management?
  2. The authors discuss how social practices in CMC can reflect linguistic variation, identity constructuion, and engagement with public discourse. How can this be reconciled with the adage “Twitter is not real life,” meaning that CMC doesn’t reflect the population at large, because only a subset participates?
  3. In many forms of CMC, we have no information about the identity of the person behind the screen. What difficulties does this add to interpreting social practices?