A4 Jon Baxter

I have many conversations via email with one of my best friends at school because we live far away and don't hang out in person very often.  We often make assumptions about each other's knowledge so that we can have efficient conversations, and most of the time we'll understand each other fine.  However, sometimes she'll mention the name of someone that I don't remember, and normally I can guess that this person is in a band that she really likes.  It only takes a quick Google search to confirm, and it's interesting because email is one of the only media where this can happen because it's very asynchronous so if it takes me hours to answer her email, that's normal.

Friend: purple is dead.  gabe saporta murdered it with his bare hands...

Me: (after some Googling about who gabe saporta is and why he could have killed purple) maybe if he killed purple he's the one who brought back Blink

Friend: no psh, if anybody brought blink back, it was the cobra.  but if the cobra can't bring midtown back, there's really no hope for this to correlate with blink. sorry.

As demonstrated in the chart in the Clark and Brennan reading, email only affords reviewability and revisability, so this causes us to adapt and use alternate methods of grounding than we would if we were talking face to face, for example.  If I were speaking with my friend face to face, she would notice immediately that I didn't know who she was talking about after her first utterance, and she would either yell at me for losing track of who it is or just drop in the line "the lead singer of cobra starship".

Later on in the conversation, she asks "but does this mean I shouldn't get a purple ipod nano?"  If I didn't know that she has been debating getting her first ipod for the last week and wasn't sure what type or color to get, it would take me a few seconds to put these things together and I probably would have asked her in surprise, "you're thinking about getting an iPod nano?" so that she would elaborate.  But because we have common ground in this area already, I understand just fine and proceed to give her advice on what color ipod she should go with if not purple.  At this point, I was thinking about mentioning the color of one of my sweatshirts as something she should strive to achieve for her iPod color, but then I remembered that she has probably never seen this sweatshirt, and I would have to send her a picture or link her to a website with the sweatshirt on it.

So in general, my friend and I don't have to do much grounding because we know each other really well, we talk a lot over email, IM and other textual media, and we have a lot of the same interests.  However, there are times when we get confused, or when I realize that I can't make a reference that she won't get because we don't see each other very often.