My best friend and I went to high school together. We met towards the middle of my freshman year – but by that point, she was a junior. After she graduated, since she went to a college in our hometown, communication wasn’t an issue. We talked on the phone every night and were able to meet up pretty frequently. Since I’m now 4 and a half hours away from home, and we both have busy schedules, finding common time is difficult. AIM is the most frequent method we use to communicate because it has a low start-up cost and a low formulation cost, although on weekends we sometimes exchange phone calls, and we’ll send short texts to each other to say ‘get online!!!’
[SILVI]: wats up =p
[ME]:'sokay
[ME]: nothing much
[ME]:you?
[SILVI]: same old same old wish something new would come along lol
Read without the comforting knowledge of our common ground, this conversation wouldn’t make much sense. Although we type out a lot of our words, we do use a lot of slang. However, despite the use of slang in our conversations, we still remain readily able to understand each other because we converse frequently. I understood immediately that she was talking about her family and the state of her job search. I went on to bring up the subject of her current internship. This is more evidence that we have a high amount of common ground and communicate frequently.
[ME]: how's work?
[SILVI]:I made more props lol
[ME]: thriiiiiiiiiiiiiilling
Again, to someone who doesn’t share common ground with her, her response of ‘made more props’ makes absolutely no sense. Props? Theatre props? Or maybe she got ‘props’ from a coworker or boss? I’ll clarify; my best friend is a computer animator, who is currently interning at a well-known studio in Midtown Manhattan. The use of ‘lol’ at the end of her utterance is meant to illustrate to me that she’s still not happy that she’s making props. This is more of our common ground – during our last phone call, I asked about her internship, and was told that she was making props and that she wished she could get on to the animating stuff already. My drawn-out ‘thriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilling’ is sarcastic, because I sympathize with her frustrations.
[SILVI]: lol it was fun though but yea ooh let me send you the [jon] stuff
[SILVI]: the dragon one lol
[ME]:awhhh
[SILVI]: hard toy
[ME]: does it really work?
[SILVI]: it did till he painted it lol then it couldnt spin
This part of the conversation begins once again by drawing on our common ground. Jon is a friend she went to college with, who switched his major to toy design at the beginning of their senior year and consequently had to remain in college an extra year. She was impressed by a project he had recently done, and wanted me to have similar feelings. I respond with positive feedback; she understands that my “awhhh” means “wow! Really cute!” She also understands that I may be slightly confused about what type of toy this is, and volunteers extra information (“hard toy”) to clear up any confusion that I might have. I respond with more positive feedback; I’m impressed and I want to know if the toy indeed works, so she supplies me with that information.
I believe you can tell by our conversation that we are very close friends and that despite the distance between our physical locations, we still maintain a large amount of common ground. We spend most of the conversation in State 3 (Clark & Brennan), with only a couple deviations to State 2, which further demonstrates the high amount of common ground we share.
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I have also found aim as the most convenient time to talk to friends ezpecially since aim can be put on cell phones. The frequent use of aim to maintain conversation has low cost but also allows for an for common ground through conversations from the night before being extend since aim saves the conversation unless you cleared them. I have found that useful along with grounding. That is very true when certain words are used such as props. I assumed props meant a number of things before I read the paragraph below that statement. Common ground ads as you state a more understandable conversation.
ReplyDeleteAIM seems to be an excellent communications medium for friends away from home. I feel that it provides a great degree of back-and-forth, clear communication. I as well as my peers are very comfortable expressing ourselves in this medium. In addition, one of its great strengths is that you can be working on something else while participating in the conversation. This makes instant messaging especially effective in situations like you described. Perhaps your friend would have been too busy to be on the phone, but could still IM while working on creating props.
ReplyDeleteInteresting conversation... even reading it as an outsider I didn't feel like I needed that much previous knowledge to understand what you guys were talking about. when he says "hard toy" that clarifies what you guys are talking about. this conversation didn't get too deep and therefore didn't need that much grounding.
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