Doing Sociolinguistic Research on the French Minitel

Abstract

This article discusses the problems involved in applying sociolinguistic field methods (which have been carefully honed for use in face-to-face encounters) to the area of computer-mediated communication, and more specifically, the French Minitel. In a mostly anonymous or pseudonymous forum such as the Minitel messagerie, individual demographic information such as age, gender, race, or class may be less important in understanding the message than the community values held by participants. Such ethically required (and heuristically useful) procedures as asking permission to record and giving participants segments of recordings to solicit their reactions and interpretations are often particularly hard to carry out. From this point of view, Minitel research comes to resemble graffiti analysis with its emphasis on the relationship between messages and between messages and ground, rather than on the writer and the written.