We know from Clark and Brennan's paper that establishing common ground is a vital part of productive communication. In this post I'm going to analyze an IM conversation I recently had with my cousin about a few tv shows and a new album. Our conversation is heavily based in a previously established common ground, and therefore not much grounding has to take place for us to carry out an efficient discourse.
Cousin: decent one piece
Me: cool good stuff
you ready for a new hell's kitchen and burn notice thursday? XD
Cousin: haha
new historical bleach tomorrow too
Here my cousin launched immediately into common ground because both of us watch a tv show called one piece. I responded in turn with more references that both of us would get but might seem obscure to others. At this point in the conversation no grounding is needed. Note how my cousin uses the word historical in front of the show bleach, I immediately knew that he was referring to the fact that the next episode would be taking place in the past within the series. He merely assumed that I would pick up on this because of my existing knowledge and beliefs. We both felt the same way about flashbacks as they're called. However, immediately after this I broached a topic where grounding had to be established before continuing on.
Me: orly? laaaame
Have you heard the new MSTRKRFT album yet?
Cousin: MSTRKRFT?
Me: an electronic group, just came out with a sweet new album.
You can see the slight departure from common ground here since I assumed he had some existing knowledge about MSTRKRFT when in fact he did not. From this example I don't think the lack of FTF or a medium with more cues would have made much of a difference. We are quite accustomed to the IM medium and were able to quickly establish grounding when I departed from a common ground. There are very low forumlation costs in an IM setting an in this case it served to make the grounding go very smoothly. However, if we were trying to carry out a more formal conversation in detail on a subject through IM these costs would almost surely have a negative effect on the grounding. In such a case it would become a burden to have to type out a large amount of detail on a subject to establish common ground and would be much more efficient in a richer medium more visual cues.
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Great post Jeffrey, your conversations with your cousin clearly show that you both are aware of each others' knowledge and have a very strong sense of your common ground. I know in conversations similar to your second (regarding MSTRKRFT) my friends and I can count on each other to immediately google the unknown term (lmgify not necessary). Do you subscribe to the Media Richness theory and believe that IM is only good for trivial tasks like discussing TV shows and albums?
ReplyDeleteYou raise an interesting point when you mention the formulation costs in the IM setting. I certainly agree that for cases of where the subject can explained rather informally, IM can be very fast and efficient. I'm curious to hear why you think that the process of a more formal conversation through IM would necessarily raise the formulation cost of grounding. It would seem to me that it would be the subject itself that would determine the difficulty of grounding in the in this format rather than the formality of the conversation.
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