Shortly before I returned to Cornell for this semester I had a conversation with a friend via instant messaging. This person is a Cornell student and is in the same major that I am, so we have quite a bit of common ground relating to college. I started by asking him when he was coming back to campus. His reply was "last sunday," which was a clever way of saying that he was already back. I said, "meaning you're already there, right?" to make sure I had understood correctly, and he confirmed that I had. Thus, an unusual response to a question required grounding.
Next we talked briefly about a class we had both taken the previous semester. We shared a lot of common ground regarding this class because we had done homework and studied for the tests together. Both of us were surprised at our final grades (they were higher than expected), but neither of us actually stated the cause of our surprise. We were using our common knowledge that the class had been very difficult and we hadn't gotten particularly good grades on most assignments.
My friend then told me that he'd gotten a PlayStation 3 for Christmas. Knowing that I had a pretty good knowledge of video games, he started telling me about one specific game: "it was the best for little big planet, though... so many people have made their own levels." However, I wasn't familiar with that game, so I needed some grounding. I asked about the game and my friend filled me in.
In addition to using grounding in the context of specific things we talked about, the conversation contained a lot of "yeahs", "cools", and other short utterances showing that we agreed with or understood what the other person was saying. In other words, they were acknowledgments of common ground. These are necessary in text environments such as IM more than in face-to-face interaction because their absence might suggest that someone isn't paying attention to the conversation. This reflects the relatively high display costs of IM compared to media where two communicators can see each other and use expressions and gestures to show that they are paying attention.
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I found your angle on this post interesting: even though you and your friend had already established a lot of common ground since you and he have known each other, you still have to clarify a lot of things in your conversations. For example, even though you knew that your friend had a Play Station 3, and that he was referring to a specific game, you did not know enough about the game to respond.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate to this. Last semester I took a class and I had worked closely on all the assignments with one of my classmates. This classmate and I constantly communicated on Instant Messenger. When the final grades came out we were both also surprised that they were higher but we did not explicitly state the reasons we were surprised. Communicating on IM is definitely a better way to talk to weak ties because it avoids awkward moments and it lets you review things before you send it.
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