Who’s got the floor in computer-mediated conversation? Edelsky’s gender patterns revisited

Edelsky’s (1981) proposal that floor in face-to-face conversation is constructed jointly over a series of turns is adapted in this study to analyze three extended threads from academic discussion lists on the Internet. Paralleling Edelsky’s study, which found that F1 (linear, hierarchical) floors had mostly male participants, while F2 (collaborative, egalitarian) floors were participated in by women and men equally, gender is examined as a variable in relation to patterns of participation. The results partially support the existence of distinct floor types in the academic discussion lists that resemble the two types identified by Edelsky and that are associated with the gender composition of a discussion. Male-predominant discussions exhibit the features of the F1 floor type; however, female-predominant discussions exhibit a mixed floor type combining features of F2, F1 (male predominant) and F1 (predominant) floors. An integrated account of these findings based on the conventional mapping of gender and floor onto power relations is proposed and invoked to explain phenomena that appear anomalous under a simple floor- or gender-based view, including the greater likelihood that messages posted by certain participants will receive responses. The concluding sections consider the implications of this account for the notion of floor in CMC and for floor-based accounts of participation and response patterns in conversational interaction more generally.

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