Negotiating legal identities online: narratives of drug use

This chapter examines the construction of legal identities in an online drug user forum. In order to guarantee legal immunity from prosecution, the House Rules of drug user forums frequently recommend that posters use certain linguistic forms to refer to themselves when posting narratives about drug use. These include the acronym SWIM ("someone who isn't me") and third person pronouns in subject position. The different effects that this kind of self-positioning has on online interaction will be illustrated by applying Goffman's (1981) categories for responsibility for talk (authors, animators, figures) to the discourse of a single forum. The results show that, since the use of usernames in the online context is already a guarantee of anonymity, additional aliases such as SWIM create a twice-removed level of discourse which conjures up a "story world within a story world". Secondly posters' self-conscious use of linguistic devices to distance themselves from personal and legal responsibility for narrated activities carries with it the implication that "we know that the narrated events are illegal". It is argued that this "knowingly illegal" frame heightens the affiliation achieved by co-narration, binding the discourse community closer together. Thirdly, posters' strict conformity to the norm of the forum reinforce its strongly hierarchical structure, which is in contrast with the non-conformist nature of the narrated activities themselves.