Arguing in Internet chat rooms: argumentative adaptations to chat room design and some consequences for public deliberation at a distance.

• Author: Weger, Jr., Harry

Once identified as a cause of citizens exclusion from public dialogue, electronic media in its most recent forms may foster greater opportunity for broader participation in discussions of public policy. The disappearance of citizen participation in the public sphere (e.g., Goodnight, 1982) has been associated with the rise of early forms of electronic media such as television, radio, and newspapers. The public deliberation in the mass media age changed the nature of argumentation in the public sphere (e.g., Sennett, 1977). Traditionally, public deliberation involved localized communication events which brought the community together and encouraged participation by ordinary members of the public. The shift to public argument in mass media resulted in non-interactive, distant, and passive communication events in which the public was neitiler given access, nor encouraged to participate (see Hollihan, Klumpp, & Riley, 1999). Instead, technical elites (those with technical or expert knowledge in a particular field) spoke for the audience members bringing the "voice of reason" to public debate. There has been a radical change since that time, however, in the media available to ordinary citizens for interactive communication at a distance, thereby reinventing the possibilities for engaging in public discourse.

The new media include "information and communication technology" (ICT) and services which range from PC-based Internet access to mobile connectivity through wireless devices. There are about 300 million PC based Interact users in the world, with 150 million in the United States, and 600 million mobile phone users world-wide, with about 50 million in the United States (Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Rice & Katz, 2001). The pervasiveness of ICT use creates new opportunities for citizens to engage each other in the public sphere. Despite claims that Internet use leads to social isolation and a decline in civic participation (Kraut, Lundmark, Patterson, Kiesler, Mukopadhyay, & Scherlis, 1998), more recent evidence indicates that Internet use increases and solidifies users' social networks and may even broaden the means of civic participation (Katz, Rice, & Aspden, 2001; Katz & Rice, 2002). Central to this finding are interactive, text-based ICTs such as email, listserv, message boards, and chat room platforms such as internet-relay chat (IRC).

Goodnight (1995) has argued that there has been a shift in the nature of "the public" from a sense of one broad generic public arena to multiple and various sites for public engagement. In this light, ICTs are not simple conduits for information exchange but means to construct a wide range of for a for communication at a distance. Fernback (1997) argues that the new media allows everyday citizens to "break our public silence" and become involved in public communication. Whether or not this is the case, an important issue for the argumentation critic lies in rendering these new media accessible to argumentation criticism. While the thought that technology might return the agora, or even the town hall, is a compelling image, Goodnight (1982), as well as others (e.g., Willard, 1985), suggests that communication scholars should search out and illuminate the possibilities and pitfalls involved in new communication media. Just as Habermas (1962/1989) suggests that social realities constrain the shape of public discourse, we suggest that technical realities (i.e., the design of communication technology) shape the way public deliberation is carried out in cyberspace. In this paper, we explore how the design of Internet communication spaces invites or discourages rational public dialogue.

We have chosen to examine the Internet chat room as an example of an engineered communication space. Of all Internet communication spaces, chat rooms perhaps provide one of the best opportunities for dialogue with some resemblance to everyday communication. While arguments about public issues occur on web pages, Usenet groups, and bulletin board systems, it is in the chat room where social actors communicate with each other directly and in real time. From the time of the Enlightenment, the most important, and perhaps most influential, public deliberation involved small congregations of individuals testing ideas with one another. As Taylor (1995) explains, it is often the discussion of public issues among small groups of citizens that creates the shared meanings that connect the "public" to its individual members, "Through ... scattered, small-scale personal exchanges in salons, coffeehouses, and (in some cases) political assemblies, there emerges a sense of nation, or its literate segment, an opinion that deserves to be called 'public'" (p. 217). Since chat rooms involve synchronous communication between individuals in real time, they approximate a type of discussion about public issues commonly idealized as a source of deliberative democracy. A key issue in understanding deliberation in the public sphere is to examine the role of new media. The affordances technological venues provide people to participate in deliberation is an important focal point (Aakhus, 1999; Aakhus, 2000; Aakhus, 2001; de Moor & Aakhus, 2003).

We examine chat room interaction relative to the ideals of critical discussion (van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992; van Eemeren, Grootendorst, Jackson, & Jacobs, 1993; Walton, 1989) to understand the relationship between the forum and the talk. In light of an ideal model of argumentation, we expect that chat room interaction is likely to be found wanting. Our purpose here is not to decry the state of argumentation online, but to understand how the communicative resources available in these settings contribute to what may otherwise appear to be poor argumentation skills or questionable motives by chat room participants. Our focus is on discourse and how the design features of chat rooms contribute to discourse quality. Moreover, by examining departures from the critical discussion ideal we better understand the phenomenon of deliberating at a distance. We first describe our analytical strategy followed by a report of our findings about the problems chat room formats present for conducting deliberation at a distance. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for understanding the reflexive relationship between new media technology design and the qualities of argumentative dialogue.

ARGUMENTATION ANALYSIS STRATEGY

Data Acquisition

The data used for this analysis was taken from the America Online (AOL) chat rooms entitled "From the Left," "From the Right," "Today's News," "Clinton Scandal" and "Gun Control." We chose these chat rooms for analysis based on their specific emphasis on discussions of public issues. Before formal analysis began, the first author spent more than 200 hours over two years as a participant observer in politically oriented chat rooms on AOL. In order to generate data for this analysis, the first author collected 10 transcripts of 20 minute discussions which occurred in the 5 politically oriented chat rooms identified above. The first author did not participate in these discussions so that his contributions would not influence the argumentation practices that occurred in these sessions. Based upon the first author's experience as a participant observer, the data collected for this analysis was judged to be typical of the kind of communication that occurs in politically oriented chat rooms on AOL.

Our analysis is based both on the data from the transcripts and the first hand experience of participation in the chat room discussions. The transcripts were gathered primarily as a way to generate empirical data for use in reconstructing argumentation practices and for use as real world examples of argumentation in AOL chat rooms. One reason AOL was chosen as the site of our analysis rests on its enormous popularity with the general Internet using public. At the time of the study, AOL had roughly 31 million subscribers and had surpassed IRC as a platform for Internet chat (Delio, 2001). Because it has such a large and pervasive membership base, AOL presents great potential for the conduct of wide reaching deliberation of public issues by ordinary citizens. However, we could have just as easily chosen Internet-relay Chat (IRC), or some other chat room platform as the source of our data. The purpose of our study is not to single out AOL chat rooms for criticism but to examine the ways in which the design of public spaces on the Internet constrain or invite rational discussion practices and to better understand the conduct of deliberation at a distance.

Argumentation Analysis Model

Our strategy for reconstructing arguments in AOL chat rooms is founded on the pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation criticism (e.g., van Eemeren, et al, 1993; van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 1992). The pragma-dialectical approach places an emphasis on the functional utility of arguments as they are used to achieve communicative goals. People use arguments to attack or defend standpoints in the face of real or imagined opposition from a fellow interlocutor. Pragma-dialectical criticism is modeled on a set of idealized or normative procedures for conducting a "critical discussion" in which participants attempt to resolve a difference of opinion based on the merits of the case. Under ideal conditions, involving ideal participants, the normative model for standards for conducting critical discussion should produce resolution. However, resolution is not the same as mere cessation of conflict whether through avoidance or coercion. Instead, resolution, if it occurs at all, will be, "recognized by both parties as correct, justified, and rational" (van Eemeren, et al, 1993, p. 25).

For the purposes of examining arguments as they occur in everyday interaction, the pragma-dialectical approach provides an advance on more traditional, logic based, models of argument criticism. Pragma-dialectics...