Knee-jerk Anti-LOOPism and other E-mail Phenomena: Oral, Written, and Electronic Patterns in Computer-Mediated Communication

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into the on-going electronic interaction of a natural distributed group. Prior organizational research into use of electronic media has focused primarily on usage patterns and only occasionally on a few linguistic features, while linguistics researchers have looked more closely at certain technical aspects of language use in electronic communication. Interested in a broader range of linguistic and textural features that might be exhibited in the electronic mail medium, we conducted an exploratory study of the electronic communication of a task-oriented group over a 27 month period. Using qualitative and quantitative techniques, we found that the electronic mail messages displayed features normally associated with both speech and written discourse, as well as features that seem new to the electronic medium. The use of all three patterns was influenced by characteristics of the medium, the group, and its task.