ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the virtual space and investigates the way in which online voice is connected to the formation of social groups in the contemporary Chinese society. Virtual spaces are private, as voice emerges from the ways in which individuals align their sociolinguistic resources to "ecologically valid" norms; at a public scale, such locally bounded voice can be dismissed or disqualified as "illegitimate". At a lexical level, new vocabularies are coined the not only are used in virtual spaces but also increasingly circulate in the offline world. The virtual spaces studied in this research are a hobbyist BBS and the informants’ Weibo pages. BBS users sometimes manipulate their wording to avoid sysop filtering and to articulate a voice. Online social networking environments such as BBSs and Weibo become part of people’s social life, and their impacts are seemingly self-evident. The online-offline distinction is an artifactual one which increasingly becomes useless in the investigation of people’s actual life experiences.
