Being lucky--virtual performative speech acts.

Abstract

Learner conversations within a web-based adult online learning community for trainee London (UK) cabbies were studied and here are broadly categorised into three main conversational themes: content, process, and affect. The third theme, affect, includes learner interactions that operate in a register of mutual support and well-wishing. This paper utilises speech act theory to help understand the function(s) of emotion-based online conversations. It posits the existence of an affective channel of interaction that acts as a performative field of interpersonal exchange, one that gives normally atomised learners a venue in which they can leverage their agency and forge peer relationships.

Introduction and Objectives

London licensed taxi drivers are among the best-trained professionals in the world. They spend several years committing 25,000 streets, more than 100,000 points of interest, traffic routes and rush-hour patterns--collectively called 'The Knowledge'--to memory, and submit to an intensive battery of 15 or more written and oral examinations. Typically, Knowledge Boys and Girls are asked to recite, without the aid of a map, the most efficient route from one public place in Greater London to any other public point, making explicit reference to each road, ram, construction zone, and roundabout along the way. Questions such as, "Take me street-by-street from Cromwell Hospital to the Bleeding Heart Restaurant," and "How would you get from the Earl's Court YMCA to the Bank of Cyprus during rush hour?" test very fine-grained understanding of city geography as well as accurate and efficient navigational ability. Despite the daunting volume of information to be learned, these learners, who call themselves Knowledge Boys and Girls (KB/KGs), most often undertake this course of study entirely on their own, without the backing of formal educational institutions, and wind up spending years studying alone. The only chances many KB/KGs have to meet one another are at examinations and their initial orientation session. The potential for isolation in this endeavour is therefore quite staggering, and moreover, unusual for such a rigorous programme of training.

As a response to the solitary nature of their studies, KB/KG's have spontaneously begun to create virtual communities for themselves on the Internet during the past five years. Through web-based message boards, sample examination questions, and chat rooms, they have established online venues for meeting and interacting with other KB/KGs who are also struggling with the difficult work of completing 'The Knowledge'. The presence of this online space prompts some important questions about the way these 'wired' Knowledge Boys/Girls train themselves. The broader question that guides this research is one of benefit. That is, what advantages accrue to learners who participate in these sorts of ad hoc online learning communities (OLCs)? This paper separates out one element of the electronic interaction that occurs among learners--affective exchange--and enlists speech act theory to postulate how emotion-based conversations might operate in the complex social field of a learning community in cyberspace, and ultimately, what beneficial effects these interactions might have for adult learners.

Perspectives and Theoretical Framework

Understanding language as more than verifiable or metaphysical utterances is the foundation of speech act theory. Developed by J.L. Austin (1975) and elaborated by John Searle (1969, 1979), speech act theory holds that entire classes of speech/writing are not used within any received framework of truth or falsehood; rather, they operate more as doing something than as saying something. For example, 'I hereby leave my estate to Jane', or 'I bet you five dollars that he has a hat' are statements that cannot be classed as true or false in any verifiable sense. Moreover, their very production contains the kernel of their executio--saying these things is doing, in a very real way. Performatives, as they are called by Austin (1975) are subject to specific rules governing their use, if they are to be properly enacted. These 'felicity' conditions are quite similar to what Searle (1969: 45) calls 'conventional aspects' of language. In particular, Austin's (1975: 97-120) discussion of illocutionary and perlocutionary acts informs the analytical approach taken in this research--specifically, the notion of an illocution as what a person creates when s/he produces meaningful utterances (i.e. arguing, announcing), and the notion of a perlocution as a purposive form of illocution, meant to achieve some end-effect (i.e. persuading, alerting). Because both illocutions and perlocutions are rule-based forms of language, and as noted above, their success or failure is entirely dependent on mutual conventions, the use of performative language can be interpreted as an indicator of the rule-systems in which they operate. In essence, where performative speech exists, it points to assumptions made by one or more participants that the venue, speaker, receiver(s), and sociocultural contexts are appropriate for illocutions and perlocutions to succeed. This in turn gives some indication of how participants view their interactional milieu and their position within it (Szerszynski 1999, Butler 1997).

Methods and Techniques

In 2001, an online learning community for KB/KGs was selected for study because of its open, public access; busy message boards; and the depth and breadth of study materials on offer. Non-participant observation was chosen as the best methodological approach to studying the online message boards because (a) the learners would not be distracted from their natural conversation topics, (b) interaction observed online would be exclusively learner-learner interaction (not learner-researcher), and (c) given this researcher's comparatively novice-level understanding of the educational content (the minutiae of London geography), there was little opportunity to contribute in a way that might assist trainee cabbies. As the conversations were conducted openly in the public sphere, with absolutely no protections against accessing or reading them, the ethical stance of such a nun-intrusive approach is easily justified and has considerable precedent in the literature (Rafeli & Sudweeks 1996, 1998, Paccagnella 1997, Frankel & Siang 1999, Eysenback & Till 2001). Nonetheless, the ethical standard practices of the Association of Interact Researchers (Ess & AoIR 2002) recommend that the confidentiality and anonymity of the members (individually and in aggregate) of these sorts of public groups be maintained.

509 message board postings were collected from this online community over a 16-day period in 2001. This time span mimics the automatic deletion cycle for the message board. What resulted was a historical account of the contributive traffic to the online community during this conversation cycle. Of course, the actual total traffic on the message boards is undoubtedly substantially more than the contributions would indicate, as many 'lurkers' read messages and use the online resources without making their presence known to the other learners. Message board postings were collected together into a very large ASCII file and imported into ATLAS/ti, a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software CAQDAS) package that manages large volumes of data to be coded and categorised, grouped, re-grouped, and shuffled about in a computerised workspace. Much qualitative analysis software works similarly to a word processing application, with the important added feature of allowing the user to search and link sections of hundreds of discrete documents. In this study, CAQDAS was used simply to organise the large number of individual pieces of data (the message postings) in an orderly way that allowed easy cross-referencing and sorting.

The data were coded by emergent theme, using an inductive analytical approach that relied on close, interpretive reading of the postings. Each reading was accompanied by careful note-taking in ATLAS/ti that allowed a tandem viewing of the raw text alongside the researcher's comments. The message postings were then manually coded, based on the notes made during the recursive re-readings, until all of the 509 messages were sorted into three super-categories: content-focussed interactions, process-focussed interactions, and affective interactions. That this third, affect-based class of exchanges emerged as a consistent strand of discourse amongst learners was perhaps the most surprising result to emerge from the study. It was therefore flagged for further research and then taken up again as part of the work described herein. Speech act theory seemed to be a promising avenue of exploration of the affective register of inter-learner communication online, as this class of interactions implicitly acknowledges the position of the online learning community qua community. In doing so, it appeals to the social matrix that binds these Knowledge Boys and Girls together--indeed, it is only within the framework of mutual participation and acceptance that performative acts can be 'felicitous' (Austin 1975) and 'conventional' (Searle 1969), and thus, successful.

The conversations containing affective interactions were taken from the original data and collected into a smaller dataset that was then re-coded in ATLAS/ti in answering two research questions. What types of affective performative speech acts do KB/KGs engage in, within their online community? What does the production of performative speech online indicate about the way the KB/KGs view their online learning space? Austin's (1975) advice that attention must be paid to the "total situation in which the [performative] utterance was issued" (p. 52) was used to guide this process with special attention paid to the perlocutionary force (intended effect) of exchanges. The possibility of both indirect and direct performativity was also admitted, such that this analysis expands Austin and Searle's models of performative speech to include all text that is produced to induce some change or action on the part of the receiver or community at large.

Findings

Several sub-classes of performative speech acts emerged from this analysis. In particular: Expressions of fear of failure (indirect performatives); Expressions of enjoyment of 'The Knowledge' (indirect performatives); Comforting (direct performatives); Luck wishes (direct performatives). Both the expressions of fear of failure and those of enjoyment were not utilised within this discourse community as simple, reflective comments made cathartically (although that function is probably quite important). On the contrary, in almost every occurrence of these two types of exchanges, they were reactively followed-up by another community member--in the case of the expressions of fear, other users responded with comforting language; and in the case of expressions of enjoyment, other users chimed in with either similar stories or gratitude for the encouragement. Although these sub-classes seem to originate in opposite sentiments (fear vs. satisfaction), they both contain the perlocutionary force to elicit an in-kind response from fellow learners, albeit without explicitly demanding one. It is also no coincidence that the responses to these indirect performatives were olden performative in their own right. Whereas the original comments relied upon social conventions to achieve their desired perlocutionary effect (eliciting comfort, encouraging others), the responses often quite directly engaged the users in these actions. Also striking in the message-board postings was the use of statements such as these: "Blucky ... ...' or 'Be lucky' or 'B. lucky ... ....as is the general way to finish on the Knowledge sites.' (all June 2001) NB- all spelling and usage errors are reproduced verbatim from the site.

A very large number of messages closed with just such a luck wish. These statements, addressed to single individuals and the entire community alike, can be interpreted as operating on two axes of performativity. First, they act to shore up the confidence of the recipient(s) by way of declaring a supportive position. Second, they appeal to a superstitious register of the performative--the perlocutionary force here residing in the possibility that a luck wish might be tantamount to a protective incantation. Wishing luck is therefore a positively-toned, direct performative that exploits the perceived potential for both good feeling and good fortune to come from a few words. By engaging one another online in conversations that make great use of performative speech, Knowledge Boys and Girls generate electronic streams of affect that flow from and back to contributors. The online world of a KB/KG is not simply a discursive assemblage of street directions and places to turn around; it is a place that contains nodes of emotion as well as the linguistic tools that could link these together in expressive, interactive channels.

Discussion and Relevance

The very fact that Knowledge Boys and Girls treat their online learning community as a venue where they employ performative speech is an important finding. It indicates that, to the users, their parcel of cyberspace is more than a simple repository for study questions and cartographic details of London. It is a space that possesses social conventions--a virtual space where users can make things happen by communicating. Indeed, the possibility of investing perlocutionary force in a message board posting provides direct evidence of the marshalling and deployment of sociocultural agency online. This ability to conduct behaviours online that engage with a sense of possibility outside the boundaries of shared Internet space is something that some early researchers of Internet-mediated interaction were quite sceptical about (especially Postman 1993, and Neill 1995), but which more recently, online-learning and community experts have acknowledged is not only possible, but important to collaboration online (Ko & Rossen 2003; Palloff & Pratt 1999, 2000; Salmon 2000; Preece 1999). Acknowledging the expanding boundaries of the social, the performative speech of these trainee cabbies can be seen as yet another manifestation of the new complexity of a social matrix that encompasses physical and virtual space. If indeed users of an online learning community can come to operationalise their agency to realise situations that fulfil their desire for support, humour, comfort, and encouragement, this indicates that there is something substantial to be gained from talking online with fellow learners, whether or not there is a formalised, institutional course structure that connects them. The implications of this are most striking for auto-didacts like the Knowledge Boys and Girls, who rarely have a chance to meet one another because they are not connected by any learning-institution's infrastructure. The findings from this study show that is possible for these atomised learners to locate one another online and then to leverage their virtual interactions in a non-trivial way. This evidence that some learners utilise web-based informal groups as an actionable field for creation of supportive, learning-centred interpersonal ties should lead Interact researchers to explore how to design virtual spaces that might foster similar, and perhaps even more intensely mutual learning relationships.

References

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A.R. Ross, Oxford University, UK

A.R. Ross is an Internet researcher, where he studies online learning communities. He has taught postgraduates in Oxford's Department of Educational Studies.