Grounding is described as a process used to establish common ground when communicating. According to Clark and Brennan, the process of grounding is shaped by two factors; "purpose – what the two people are trying to accomplish in their communication" and "medium of communication- the techniques available in the medium for accomplishing that purposed, and what it costs to use them."
A recent conversation I had was with my friend Natalie* on Google's instant messaging service, Google Talk. I set the stage for the conversation hoping one of my friends would contact me. Drawing on existing common ground, I recalled a previous conversation we had about our spring break plans. I purposefully made my Google Talk status "going to Mexico for spring break! Puerto Vallarta!" to incite the conversation…
I would consider my status to be a presentation of an utterance. Once the conversation ensued more meaningful contributions were made to ensure we had a mutual understanding of what we were about to discuss. Here is a snippet of the first few utterances of our conversation:
2:39 PM *: wait...u are?!!
2:40 PM me: ...
Are you?
lol.
idk.
2:42 PM *: i am....r u trying to plan something? or r u messin with pple? lol
me: lol. I am thinking of planning something.
These first few lines display what Clark and Brennan describe as the acceptance phase. At the end of the snippet, Natalie was able to fully understand what I meant by my status. She arrived at State 3 ("B understood what A meant by u") We sufficiently created a common ground about our plans to travel for Spring Break.
Considering the principle of least collaborative effort which is described as the phenomena "in conversation,[where] the participants try to minimize their collaborative effort the work that both do from the initiation of each contribution to its mutual acceptance" It seems that I violated the quantity maxim, because all of the contributions I made where not necessary. I could have been more direct in my conversation, but I found it more entertained to converse in a more playful tone. Since we did not have time pressure constraints, I could afford to take my time with the conversation.
Given our medium of two-way chat we were under the influence of 5 factors: cotemporality, simultaneity, sequentiality, reviewability, revisability. I was able to go back in our conversation and ask my friend to clarify her plans with a more direct question…
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I agree with the notion of IMs kind of foster a sense of entertainment versus communication in an direct focused manner. The tone set by IM is always unknown and the way you imagine a message being said could influence how you think the tone is when in reality your assumption could be different from the people you are chatting with. I feel like it is difficult to convey a sense of being rushed via IM when type patterns have been solidified and applied to all tones of conversations.
ReplyDeleteI found your post interesting when you said that your conversation did not reflect the principle of least collaborative effort. We realize that this theory depend on the purpose of the participants. Also, in a chat setting, it is difficult to know if all participants are involved in a same degree of grounding. When participant is chatting with more than one other person or becomes distracted for whatever reason, there may be change of topic without fully understanding it. I wonder how distraction would affect the quality of communication with different mediums?
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