A Quantitative Analysis of the Content and Structure of Public Requests for Private Interaction Posted in Online Public Chatrooms

Evidence is presented suggesting that the majority (88%) of online requests for private computer-mediated communication posted in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatrooms are derivations of the following prototypical structure: (a) a target specifier, e.g., "any girls"; (b) the communication request itself, e.g., "wanna chat"; (c) a self-identifier, e.g., "to a guy"; and (d) a communication directive, e.g., "msg me!" A methodology capable of identifying individual differences in the frequency of language usage on IRC was developed and used to generate a taxonomy of the phrases commonly used in each of these four components. This taxonomy of 82 phrases accounted for 14.5% of the total language used across a variety of IRC chatrooms and 77% of the words used in requests for private interaction. It also identified at least one component in 83% of all requests for private interaction posted on IRC, while having only a 10% rate of false (non-request) identification. The reduced complexity and increased explicitness of requests for private interaction on IRC is interpreted using politeness theory. The application of the current methodology for research assessing the formation of online romantic and interpersonal relationships is considered, as are the utility of quantitative analyses of discourse structures in computer-mediated communication for profiling people who use IRC for various purposes.

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