In a conversation over this past weekend, I had a very technical discussion via IM with one of my colleagues for an independent research project. Because of the very technical nature of the conversation, we both relied very heavily on common ground to facilitate a relatively painless exchange over instant messenger.
To see the importance of common ground, examine the beginning of our conversation:
Jonathan: are you using the dk site's utilities for arcs?
Tom: yeah
Tom: as far as i can tell dk's utilities are writing 1.1 files
Tom: is that what you've found?
Jonathan: ok, well i haven't tested the dk and seen the outputted arc
To an outside observer, this conversation would certainly make very little sense. This is mostly due to the fact that, here, we are relying on common ground almost entirely. The common ground had been established over the course of the past few weeks in our meetings on similar subject matter. What grounding we do in this exchange is mostly limited to positive evidence(acknowledgements).
However, since much of what we were discussing wasn’t completely understood by both of us, due to the fact that we have only been working with this existing knowledge for a relatively brief period of time, grounding does play a significant role. Below is a excerpt where I look initially misunderstood Jonathan’s claim, due to a lack of referential identity, and needed a clarification. Following the clarification, I provide an acknowledgement for further grounding:
Jonathan: the 2nd version block number will change to 1
Jonathan: if it has xml metadata
Jonathan: that is if it v1.1
Tom: could u give me the link to where you're getting the info
Tom: the arc xml metadata is here: http://www.archive.org/arc/1.0/arc.html
Jonathan: the original arc file format: http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/ArcFileFormat.php
Tom: ok
Tom: so these are 1.0 files then..
In summary, this technical discussion relies heavily on common ground, in the form of existing knowledge. However, because the technical background required is so vast, sometimes existing knowledge isn’t enough, and more extensive grounding is required to fully understand an utterance. In this medium(IM), grounding was made easier by cotemporality, which enables a fast exchange of grounding information to make clarifications.
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Well, I'll have to admit your chat snippets definitely went over my head. lol.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I began to wonder if the occurrence you describe is something that's specific to technical conversations. I feel that while technical discussions benefit from a shared understanding and comprehension of the topic. Grounding is still very necessary. Grounding helps to ensure that you're talking about the same issue as evidenced in your second snippet. In the case of less technical topics, where there may be less common ground, the grounding process may be used to share knowledge that may not be mutually understood...
I think technical conversations are a perfect example of when grounding is needed. It seems us tech dorks often want to make everything an acronym or some kind of shorthand. It's very intimidating for those who lack the knowledge to understand what a technically-minded person might be talking about. No one wants to be the person in the class who raises their hand to ask what an API is. Or JDK, or JRE. You get the point. Sometimes they don't even make sense. The first P in PHP stands for...PHP, of course.
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