ABSTRACT
Even in primarily serious business email, evidence of playful, artful performance occasionally “bubbles up.” However, it is in synchronous modes that playful performance particularly flourishes – in purely spontaneous, online social chat as well as in scripted events that invite improvisation. This chapter documents and explicates this phenomenon in two studies of playful interaction on Internet Relay Chat. The first study is an analysis of a sequence of interaction that took place in December, 1991, in which the players simulated smoking marihuana by typing. The second study is of a group called the Hamnet Players, who experimented with the idea of virtual theater in 1993-94, in partially scripted, partially improvised performances of parodies of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth. The analysis shows that Hamnet performances were Bakhtinian carnivals of textual and typographic play. One of the questions which the chapter asks is: What is the basis for the author's suggestion that there are similarities between typed online interaction and jazz?.
