It’s funny how sometimes things just fall into place. After reading the assignment to asses a text conversation, I thought I would have to induce a fake conversation strictly for the purpose of analyzing it. This, however, turned out to be unnecessary as a conversation fell into my lap. I was walking between classes today when I got a text message,
“pool?”
I read the short line of text and instantly processed it, knowing exactly what he was getting at. Let’s pretend for a moment that this conversation was ungrounded. Is he talking about billiards? Is he asking about the existence of a swimming pool? Does he want to go swimming? When? Where? Does he think I have a pool?
Obviously, he believed that we had enough shared knowledge that this message would make sense to me and indeed it did. Roughly translated, the message meant, “Are you going Aqua-Jogging today at 5:30 at teagle hall?” The common ground is that we are both runners and we’re both injured. We have been aqua-jogging together for the last week to try and simulate running to gain fitness. He knows I know the teagle open pool hours and he can safely assume we’re talking about teagle because it’s the only pool we’ve been to, even though there are others near by. For the first message, all the grounding was done with common knowledge.
The conversation continued as I told him I would be there and asked where I should meet him. We went on, setting up a meeting spot and time, talking about these weekends running results, and so forth. No further grounding was needed for setting up a spot or time. One might suspect that further grounding might be needed when changing subjects to results, but the only thing that could be considered grounding was “did you hear about the 3k results.” Again I could safely assume he was talking about our team, as he would have added more information had he been talking about another team (i.e. the location of the meet).
Clark and Brennan discuss the importance of grounding and state its essentiality in communication. One example that comes to mind with using common ground or past experience as a grounding agent was a few weeks ago when I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize. I had no idea what the message meant until I got the name of the person it was from. Suddenly, everything made sense. Existing knowledge can only be used when you know who the message is from. The communication (text) was worthless without grounding.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
good post hassan....i've definitely recieved those one word texts where your just like what are these people even talking about. It's like you said though, you have to have a ton of common ground, especially in the case of a one-word text. It would be interesting to see if that text would have been from a number you didn't know and how you would have responded differently.
ReplyDeleteI used to have a phone that would show the first few characters of a text. If I didn't open it, I wouldn't be charged the cost of the text, but could still see the message. As a result, some of my friends became pros at this. We obviously had to have common ground. If I got a text at work that said "1-0 TV" I knew it meant that the Sabres were winning 1-0, with Thomas Vanek scoring the goal. Sometimes I wasn't as grounded, and had no idea what a the shorthand meant. Also, sometimes the texter wouldn't quite grasp what I was trying to do, and instead of getting "out aftr wrk?", the first few characters would say "soo we were wond"...needless to say, we needed to review the grounding principles.
ReplyDelete