Lancaster University

Graduate Student, Linguistics and English Language

Ph.D. Student

Graduate College

Thesis Title: Conflict in Computer-Mediated Communication

About

My Ph.D. brings together two of my long-standing interests: computers, and conflict.

On the one hand, I am fascinated by how computer-mediated communication (CMC) is developing and how we circumvent the obstacles it presents, such as loss of tone of voice, gestures and so forth, and how we substitute these in a multitude of other ways. And on the other hand, I am equally interested in circumstances when this attempted circumvention fails and people take offence (where perhaps none was intended) and start flaming each other, or where people go online with the deliberate intention of causing offence (trolls).

One of the major questions I'm trying to answer rigorously is the issue of deindividuation: do computers really make us less aware of the feelings and thoughts of others? If so, how much? And how long does this effect last? This is perhaps a less well-known area of the interest surrounding violent computer-games and films. Rather than focussing so much on users repeatedly enacting violence, my interest is more on the psychologically distancing effect of communicating with others who are not (and may never be) co-present, in an environment where the consequences of negative, hurtful, aggressive, or inappropriate behaviour may be non-existent.

I also take a forensic linguistic approach to investigating issues such as disputed authorship/author identification, the existence (or not) of 'linguistic fingerprints', the boundaries between legal and illegal linguistic behaviour and so forth.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of my research, I've ended up branching out into all sorts of fields, such as:

- psychology (e.g. the newly developing field of cyberpsychology)

- law (e.g. harassment, disputed authorship, copyright, cybercrime)

- computer science (e.g. human-computer interaction (HCI), artificial intelligence (AI))

- media technology (e.g. malware, 'proware', the viability of anti-troll/flame/piracy applications).

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