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05

Mar 12

Bacheca » Blogs And Forums - A Few Thoughts

I've been thinking about blogs and forums. It's interesting to think about what constitutes gossip on a forum, given that there is no synchronous interaction. How can it be gossip if there is a time lag between posts? If you are posting on a forum don't you lose the interactional immediacy of gossip which is part of the fun, intimacy etc.? Or maybe forum posting is a different kind of gossip?
Which forums? There are a lot of very interesting websites which have a forum section. I had a student a few years ago who did a really good project on an internet forum. It was called Girl Power (she was one of the moderators) and she wrote about how you could linguistically detect false identities (e.g. boys pretending to be girls). Maybe if some of you are looking for ideas for data you should like at websites like this where you are likely to find a lot of gossipy, chatty stuff. It's a good idea to look at websites that you know well and are interested in. I've just written an article about a drug use forum: www.drug-forums.com . If you look at the forum section, you will find some extraordinary threads but how many of the threads can be regarded as gossip? 
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