One of my good friends Sam is abroad right now, so I decided to use a conversation we had this morning to examine grounding in CMC. Since we’re such good friends and we talk so frequently I’d say we drew on existing common ground a lot. When we reference people in our conversations, we almost always use short nicknames or first names only. Similarly, at one point on the conversation, Sam said “Do you know what you’re doing about Saturday yet?” In theory that could have been interpreted a lot of different ways, but because of previous conversations we’ve had, I knew what she was referring to.
A lot of the costs that are discussed in the Clark and Brennan article play a big role in our communication in general. Initially start-up costs can be a little difficult, because especially with the time difference, our interaction frequency isn’t always that high. Production costs are higher since we have to type instead of just speak and reception costs are often high as well (I get frustrated sometimes when she’s telling a story and I want to hear what happened next and instead I’m forced to see that she’s just “typing” or has “entered text”). Repair costs come into play since it’s more difficult to explain a misunderstanding through text. The worst, however, I believe are speaker change costs. This morning for example, Sam and I were taking turns telling stories about our weekends, and there were several occasions where she would be telling a story and I would think she was finished, so I would launch into another related story, but then I would see that she wasn’t done yet and we would be stuck in an awkward double-story limbo. Clark and Brennan discuss the use of installments for things like address exchange, but in CMC I think it applies to stories as well since in practice we don’t tell entire stories in one IM, but rather space it out through several, which can often make things confusing.
I think another thing that really related to our conversation was the principle of least collaborative effort. We often finished one anothers sentences, and tried to make our utterances as short as possible. I think time pressure played a role as well, however, and I think we were more interested in making the conversation go quickly than being efficient. Often Sam would ask a question, but then realize she knew the answer and would answer it herself right after. This shows a mistake made because of time pressure, followed by a repair intended to minimize effort.
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I find that when talking to my friends abroad time pressure plays a big role in our interactions. One main reason for this is that their internet connections are very poor, so we try to type to each other as quickly as possible just in case the connection fails. This does often lead us to "issue improper utterances" (134) and type many errors, however, we generally can still pick up what the other person is saying. This may be because the error is minor and it is still obvious, or because of the common ground we have such that the other person knows what you would be most likely talking about.
ReplyDeleteWhen errors like this happen, it is not too often that we repair them, unless there is some evidence that the other person did not understand the utterance. In this case, repair is necessary. It is true that by taking more time we could avoid these errors, but we want to get as many messages in as possible so that is not really something we worry about.
I would have thought that in talking to a friend studying abroad, there would have been much more grounding in your conversation. You say that you talk very frequently, though, so many issues are probably understood between the two of you that would be confusing otherwise. At least, for me, when I had friends studying abroad, the first part of the conversation always drew on grounding. The time zones were different, and there were many aspects of life abroad that I did not understand. More often than not, grounding was needed before the conversation really started, if only to establish that a conversation could take place.
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