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‘You show me yours, I’ll show you mine’: the negotiation of shifts from textual to visual modes in computer-mediated interaction among gay men

City University of Hong Kong, enrodney{at}cityu.edu.hk

This article explores the way users of an online gay chat room negotiate the exchange of photographs and the conduct of video conferencing sessions and how this negotiation changes the way participants manage their interactions and claim and impute social identities. Different modes of communication provide users with different resources for the control of information, affecting not just what users are able to reveal, but also what they are able to conceal. Thus, the shift from a purely textual mode for interacting to one involving visual images fundamentally changes the kinds of identities and relationships available to users. At the same time, the strategies users employ to negotiate these shifts of mode can alter the resources available in different modes. The kinds of social actions made possible through different modes, it is argued, are not just a matter of the modes themselves but also of how modes are introduced into the ongoing flow of interaction.

Key Words: chat • computer-mediated communication • cybersex • gay communication • multimodality

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