Abstract

Digital writing is strikingly playful. This playfulness flourishes particularly in synchronous chat modes on the Internet. This paper is a study of writing, play and performance on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We analyze a "virtual party" on IRC, whose highlight was a typed simulation of smoking marihuana. Three interrelated, yet analytically distinct types of play are discussed: 1) play with identity; 2) play with frames of interaction; and 3) play with typographic symbols. We adopt a qualitative, textual, and micro-sociolinguistic approach, drawing on work in discourse analysis, the study of orality and literacy, and the anthropology of play and performance. In all play there is reduced accountability for action. In the material world, masks and costumes at carnival time liberate participants; here, the ephemeral, non-material medium, the typed text, and the use of nicknames provide the mask. Although the improvisation analyzed here is typed and occurs between geographically dispersed strangers, it has fascinating affinities with "live" interactional forms such as jazz, charades, and carnivals.

PLAYFULNESS IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is strikingly playful. Millions of people are playing with their computer keyboards in ways they probably never anticipated, even performing feats of virtuosity with such humble materials as commas, colons, and backslashes. Not only hackers, computer "addicts," adolescents and children, but even2

Gordon Graham, the internet:// a philosophical inquiry. Routledge, 1999. Reviewed by Merav Katz.
Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, editors, Global Literacies and the World Wide Web. Routledge, 1999. Reviewed by Virginia Montecino.
Victor J. Vitanza, editor, CyberReader 2/e. Allyn and Bacon, 1999. Reviewed by Joe Wilferth.

Listen to Howard Rheingold read from "The Virtual Community." MIT Press will publish a revised edition of the book in November 2000

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Welcome to the Web's first edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. This site has offered Shakespeare's plays and poetry to the Internet community since 1993.
Announcement: This Web site has been unavailable for a few weeks because of a catastrophic failure of the computer that houses it. The site, including search engine and discussion area, is being restored this week (Oct. 16, 2000).

Shakespeare, especially the commedies are psyber-ellish!

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Introduction
It is not uncommon for people who meet in the text-based environments of cyberspace--asynchronous news groups and bulletin boards and synchronous chat rooms and virtual communities--to be mistaken, and sometimes wildly so, when they imagine one another's offline appearances. For example, in an article about online dating (A. Hamilton 1999), one man complains "It's draining when you realize how different people are from what they project online," and another story (J. Hamilton 1999) about the mainstreaming of online romances describes a pathway to disappointment: "The correspondents finally meet, but the chemistry crashes like a warped hard drive. Her extra five pounds is actually 50. His definition of a full head of hair proves to be a bit thin." The discrepancy between image and reality is also captured in cartoons. One depicts a sophisticated, thirty-something woman, sitting at a table for two in an upscale restaurant, saying "I loved your E-mail, but I thought you'd be older." Her dinner companion is a little boy (Weber 1998).

Not, perhaps, since the printing press's invention has European culture experienced so much upheaval. The very underpinnings of the notion of culture and of its modes of production, socialisation and appropriation are under attack. I am speaking, of course, of culture's integration in the creation of economic value. This integration process has accelerated since the beginning of the 1980s through, on one hand, the globalisation and increasing pervasion of finance in the economy, and on the other, the onslaught of so-called "new technologies".