The organization of digital conversation on MSN

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet has caused a revolution with regard to new forms of interaction between people, offering experiences of real-time communication in so-called virtual environments. Given this scenario, new textual genres emerge, making room for innumerous possibilities of analysis under various approaches. In this paper, we aim at analyzing digital conversations, trying to verify, at first, the extent to which they approach or move away from face-to-face conversations. We also seek to identify, describe and analyze some interactional strategies inherent in this new genre. We base our analyzes on Conversation Analysis theory and Interactional Sociolinguistics to define conversational strategies of the “spoken written text” on the Internet. The corpus used in this work consists of digital conversations coming from the MSN instant messaging software from Microsoft Corporation, chosen because of its wide use among people who use the internet for communication.