My friend (who I shall call POOH) and I have always talked on AIM, especially when an assignment was due the next day, in high school .Though we both attend different colleges now, when we talk on IM, we talk for hours, just like high school. This is due to grounding. Grounding is a “process of coordination” between two or more people; people in a conversation must keep in synchronization with each other. How do people stay in synch with each during a text-based mode of communication?
One way is through the principal of least collaborative effort. Both of us make an effort to understand each other by tailoring our answers and invoking responses from each other. For IM, the lines we type are short, sweet, to the point and occur often. Also, we both make the effort show that we understand each other. The following is an example of this exchange:
Me are you using assembly of operating systems?
Pooh: ?
Me:*for, assembly for OS?
Pooh: i am using assembly, but its on a microprocessor
Pooh: like, one of those little chips
Here, he showed that he didn’t understand my question so I fixed my error. We also use lots utterances as evidence. There were several “yea” and “k” in our two hour conversation.
I believe the most important way Pooh and I establish common ground is through shared awareness. Our conversations always fall back on past events from high school. The synchronization of our conversations is reliant on “mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions” (Clark 127). This time, we bonded over a mutual assumption and experience with school directories.
Pooh: and i couldn't find a directory on his [another friend] schools website
Me: what really, I assumed all school made it easy like mine does
Me: seriously, cornell is way to easy
Pooh: yea
Pooh: same, it used to have my dorm up there as well
Me: it used to have everything
Pooh: it has my current address as well
Me: wow, all ur info is here
Pooh: i know
Pooh: well, if you need to stalk me, there you go
Me: lol, I will
If someone didn’t have the past experience of having your information on a school’s directory which is accessible to the entire world, then this probably wouldn’t have very clear and would have needed explanation. Being in sync via shared awareness allows for more bonding and collaboration between people.
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The first snippet of your conversation is interesting because although the mistake in the utterance was small, it led to a contribution that was extremely difficult to comprehend the meaning of. Pooh could not even provide evidence that he understood part of the utterance. This probably caused you to go back and re-read your message for typos, since I’m guessing you believed that the utterance you had meant to say should have been clear enough that he would have understood it the first time around. Consequently, you were able to find the typo and correct it instead of just rephrasing the entire sentence.
ReplyDeleteThe first excerpt is a good example of opening with the presentation phase before moving to a clarifying question and then the acceptance phase. In the second excerpt there are several typos along the way but responding with positive utterances such as “yea” and “I know” show that the typos are minor mistakes that do not need to be corrected. I think it would be interesting to see a conversation about school directories with someone who either does not have access to a school directory that performs similar tasks or someone who doesn’t know that the function exists. You could then use to this to compare the conversation structure with a this one where both parties share common ground.
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