Instant Messaging is a unique type of media that features cotemporality, simultaneity, sequentiality, reviewability and revisability. In the following conversation I had with an Information Science Alumnus, I began by asking a few questions regarding the tool we were studying for our final project: Basecamp.
Austin Lin: for software engineering CS 501 how did you get around the chat restriction
Austin Lin: that limited to 4 people
daftstate: for basecamp?
Austin Lin: oh
Austin Lin: yeah
Austin Lin: for basecamp
daftstate: dean had an account... so we used it
Austin Lin: oh
daftstate: (iow, we paid, well someone did)
Austin Lin: alright
I messaged him out of the blue with a question and little context. In my attempt to find out the answer to my question about Basecamp, I completely forgot to include the topic from which my question stemmed. This can be seen as analogous to an improper utterance seen in Clark and Brennan. Though it is possible that I simply forgot, it is also possible that I was putting forth the Least Collaborative Effort and this was my version of a proper utterance, which would be fully understood by the addressees despite the missing information. One thing that I conveyed well with my very direct question was purpose. The other participant in the conversation immediately moved from the Presentation phase to the Acceptance phase with a clarifying question “for basecamp?” Luckily the dubious original question was interpreted correctly which quickly led to the conclusion of the acceptance phase with my acknowledgement “yeah” and then the repetition “for basecamp.”
There are much fewer examples of grounding in the second part of the conversation despite me asking a very open ended question “how are things?”
Austin Lin: how are things?
daftstate: pretty awesome. finally all settled in. maya is coming next week. work is just the way i remembered it from the summer (minus a few goodies -- economy blah). I still love going to work in the morning... i hope the feeling lasts
Austin Lin: where is maya?
daftstate: she is in NY at home (parents house). she starts training in the middle of february
Austin Lin: hows the new apartment?
In the second part of the conversation, I leveraged the existing common ground between us and used the abbreviation MTV for Mountain View, California, which would mean something entirely different outside of this context. The term tweet refers to a Twitter post, and developer G1 refers to a cell phone, both also draw from shared common ground. Within the context of the conversation in which we were discussing his work and life; all of these abbreviations tapped existing knowledge.
Austin Lin: are you commuting or are you in mtv
daftstate: i'm in MTV. the apt is pretty pimp. tho, I'm going to keep an eye on the city... i want to live there at some point
daftstate: oooh, i got the developer G1
daftstate: it's nice! (not really, it needs some work) -- but still. It's fun
Austin Lin: i saw your tweet
Austin Lin: thats cook
Austin Lin: cool
Austin Lin: I will be in SF during spring break
Austin Lin: expect a visit
Austin Lin: ok gotta run, ttyl
In the first part of the conversation in which I asked a question out of context, grounding was necessary to establish that we were talking about the same topic and that the utterances had been understood. In the second part of the conversation in which I was asking about any news in his life we drew on a wealth of existing common ground and grounding was not necessary.
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It's neat that the conversation is so diverse. I know my IM conversation that I posted is very straight forward with one purpose, but this is literally a conversation.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting to me though is the general "How are things?" question. There's a societal grounding that essentially translates into "Tell me something interesting about your life so we can build more common ground". Perhaps not so literal, but the question does have some relation to the other person and not just every general thing.
Because it seems like you know this person reasonably well, did you feel like IM limited your conversation? Or conversely, because both of you are well versed in technology, did it fuel the conversation more?
Because of the domain-specific nature of this conversation, it is a bit difficult for an outside observer to understand the exact meaning of some of the utterances here. For example, most people don't know what CS 501 or Basecamp is, and would be unable to understand it without further grounding. What is grounding for Austin, for example, may not necessarily be equivalent grounding for someone else. Furthermore, to me, the abbreviation MTV means "Music Television." Without the paragraph in the writeup providing me grounding, I would have thought that the person in question were living in a television network.
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