Rhetoric, Repression and the Loneliness of Talking the Internet

Abstract. A discursive cyberpsychological approach to the study of the internet is pioneered in this chapter. The internet is a discursively constituted phenomena: a collection of talk and texts as social practices. The internet would not exist were it not for conversation, and so the present study reports upon data from face to face interviews. The detailed analysis begins with what is expressed, and then moves on to what might be repressed, by an French international student, as he talks about his internet experiences. The utterances were rhetorically designed to argue against the presentation of the stereotypical identity of the male computer user. There was a rhetorical variability of views, in that both real relationships and virtual relationships were variously argued for and against, and the speaker might have been avoiding this stereotypical identity, by repressing an admission of his loneliness. The internet does not exist outside of social practices, and as such, the author recommends that any theory of the internet must be grounded in the detailed, systematic, empirical analyses of thes