During one of my conversations with a friend that I will call P, I had my second conversation with them after valentines day. Clark and Brennan state that each individual in a conversation should mutually understand the conversation. In the case of my conversation we both knew background on each other and speak quite often over aim. During the short aim conversation it involved both presentation and acceptance phases. The background and common ground that we knew about eachother allowed us to understand each other with short or abbreviated statements without confusing the other. We share common ground based on a mutual friend, having common interests, and being a part of the same organization. This mutual knowledge allows us to rely on existing common ground and re-establish common ground for a majority of the short conversation. This allows us to get the most out of out time and speech.
This is the beginning of our conversation where building on our previous conversation from the night before I knew what would make her laugh. After the usual greetings the building off of existing common ground began
Me: How are you miss lady?
P:Not in the best mood for some reason at dinner with Dena and Cat.
At this point I knew what would make her smile because the night before when I told her that I proposed to my girlfriend she jumped up in excitement and screamed.
Me: awww. Whats wrong? Do you want me to tell you I am PROPOSED AGAIN!!!! lol
P: Lmao that def made me smile
Me: I am engaged!!!!! lol
P: lol
Me: I am glad I made you smile
As a friend I knew how to make her smile and that it is easy to boost her spirits and help her to have a more positive mood. Relying on common ground during this conversation, I drew on things that she knows about thats going on in my life that would help her be happy by playing on her excitement for me. I used grounding and mutual knowledge in order to get a reaction. Since we are not in the same place the only reaction I can see is through text which allows copresence to not be a factor. When mentioning “PROPOSING” the cotemporality and simultaneity of that piece of the conversation helped us converse since she was happy for me which made her happy and forget about her problems for a second. Her background knowledge of my relationship and the building of the knowledge of our relationship allowed it to be clear. This conversation was allowed with low bandwidth and was done through wim on both of our cell phones. This allowed the conversation from their to become focused on me and her wanting to come to the wedding when it happens. If she continued on telling me what was wrong this collaborative effort to make her happy would not have been successful.
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Congratulations on your engagement, that's wonderful. It seems as though you made good use of the common ground the two of you share to boost her morale. Since it seems you talk somewhat frequently, there wasn't really a need to ground the conversation, which made it a smooth one. I think its funny how "lol" made the transition over from IM to texting..lots of people use it in their texts. It's funny how those expressions sound natural in mediated communication, but really unnatural face to face.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Christina about the comment regarding "lol" sounding natural in mediated communication. I also think common ground was a lot more important in this conversation than others because you had to rely on previous knowledge. Your goal was to make her feel better and grounding probably would not have really helped. You focused on something that you already knew would make her laugh and take her mind off of why she was upset.
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