Rhythm and timing in chat room interaction

This paper explores timing as a resource for meaning making in a gay chat room. It uses insights from pragmatics and related approaches to discourse to show how timingplays an important role both in the maintenance of conversational coherence, and in thenegotiation of pleasure and power. The data come from a six month long ethnographicstudy of the users of a gay chat room in Hong Kong. The analysis reveals thatparticipants use timing for a number of purposes, including maintaining a “state of talk”by communicating interest and attention, signalling different stages of the interaction andthe boundaries between them, creating implicature, communicating about identity,exercising interactional power, and facilitating their own and their interlocutors’experience of pleasure. The ways in which timing and rhythm contribute to theessentially “embodied” nature of erotically charged computer chat are discussed.