"Enter the matrix". Introdurre l'analisi della conversazione in contesti di interazione mediata

The analysis of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) opens to new perspectives in Conversation Analysis, and poses new challenges in implementing it in mediated conversations as CMC: a) implies the emerging of new communicative genres, at the boundary between written and oral; b) realise the disengagement of conversation from some constraints at the structural layer related to syncronism of interactive activity; c) introduces new rules in conversations in connection with the specific characteristics of the mediation systems. These aspects determined that many scholars focussed the analysis of virtual conversations on the constraints posed to interaction by the mediation systems but often left in the background the cultural aspects that naturally shape virtual communication as well as interactions in face to face contexts. The application of Conversation Analysis to the use of CMC introduces conversational phenomena in a new perspective in which the structure of conversation is contextualised in relation to the range of “possible events” in specific communities and within an activity system which, time by time, has communicative rules which are also shaped around the possibilities offered to participants by the mediating system.