Hanging by a Thread: Topic Development and Death in an Online Discussion of Breaking News
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Abstract
This project analyzes messages generated for an online discussion group and the topics of conversation that guide responses and prompt participants to introduce new threads for discussion. Data for this project are more than 300 postings to an unmoderated public electronic discussion group, OKLABOMB, established one day after the April 19, 1995, bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. Selected for analysis because it started as a dynamic forum for up-to-minute information, this list within a few days had degenerated away from its original purpose into a forum dominated by a handful of participants posting on marginally-related topics. Ethnographic observation of these messages coupled with conversation analysis focused on topic development revealed (often hostile) strategies used by dominant participants to bring about topic shifts. The results provide one linguistic measure of the ways in which powerful and/or persistent language users control conversation online and challenge the notion that computer-mediated discourse is democratic (cp. Herring, 1993). More generally, the results shed light on how conversational topics come alive and die in a multi-participant online environment.
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