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ection of discourse (Bourdieu, 1991). The use of language for control purposes is simul-
taneously a reflection of existing power relationships, and an exercise in extending and
entrenching them (Fairclough, 1989).
There are some qualitative differences between the ISBL and natural languages, and
these tend to intensify power effects. The ISBL is essentially an artificial language de-
signed to eliminate the possibility of misconstructions: 'for a total guarantee of adequacy
between the transmitted and received message there has to be an artificial (simplified)
language … the universalism inherent to natural language is in principle alien to it'
(Lotman, 1990, p. 13). The precision of the ISBL enables conversational mechanisms such
as turn-taking to be applied as controls rather than to check understandings. This is
consistent with the ways in which prescribed turn-taking is used to control the sequence
of events and responses that occur during rituals (Wolf, 1999, p. 128).
Issues of efficiency and convenience can be so compelling that questions concerning
autonomous IS can naturally reduce to issues of technology adoption, rates of diffusion,
and trust (Gefen et al., 2003). The linguistic perspective provides an antidote to this in
the form of an analytical platform from which to show that there can be losers as well
as winners, and that there is a fine line between encouragement and coercion where
technology adoption is concerned.
Conversations at the electronic frontier
The term 'electronic frontier' is used here to refer to the virtual space in which people
and automated systems interact as autonomous agents, with the use of 'frontier' justified
on the grounds that the two cultural groups (people and autonomous systems) are still
in the early stages of meeting, interacting with, and understanding each other (Holm,
2000). The driving force behind development of the ISBL is the problem of finding a
vehicle that will enable people, who speak a natural language with all the inbuilt
vagaries and inconsistencies of such languages, and systems that speak a conceptually
limited but highly precise language of their own, to converse with each other. The
emerging language is in this regard English-like, but is not English.
Three types of interaction involving autonomous IS can occur as follows:
1. between an autonomous individual and an organisation represented by an automated
system;
2. between an organisation represented by a person and an organisation represented
by an automated system;
3. between two organisations each represented by an automated system (in some types
of B2B procurement exchanges for instance).
For the purposes of this paper, the focus will continue to be on interactions between a
person acting individually and an autonomous system representing an organisation, al-
though it is assumed that the logic is equally applicable to the other two cases. Figure 15.1
shows the basic logic of interactions mediated by the ISBL in schematic form.
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