As I was recently posting student-generated public-facing writing, I remembered a class project that students did in 2004 in my linguistic anthropology course, Doing Things With Words. We had spent the semester thinking about language as social action, focusing on the functions of language, as Roman Jakobson analyzed them in his foundational article, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” (Jakobson 1960). But what students were especially absorbed, indeed obsessed, by was the then-new application, Instant Messaging.
The class had only eight students. They worked together to design, implement, and analyze a survey, which had more than six hundred responses. They contextualized the topic theoretically and historically. Using insights from Conversation Analysis, pragmatics, and other concepts from linguistic anthropology, the thirty-three-page document provides a glimpse into several things: the new technologies (“away messages,” "buddy lists”), “abbrevs” current at the time, in a pre-iPhone era when this technology was available only on computers, and student writing in 2004. They even had double spaces between sentences, to show how much has changed in twenty years!
This project got some attention from my discipline and was described in Anthropology News in 2005: Buzzing and Writing the Day Away Instant Messaging: Studying a New Form of Communication.
But I couldn't find the original document.
So I asked our OIT if they could help, and with the magic of the Wayback Machine, through the Internet Archive, I was able to find the old manuscript.
They did find it. And it provides a shocking view into the past, going way, way back more than two decades into an older era of education and of communication.
Here it is: “Instant Messaging: Functions of a New Communicative Tool.”
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Source Cited
Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Pp. 350-377. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
