Assignment #1 Option B

According to Clark, “entries and exits have to be engineered for each joint action separately” (37). With instant messaging, establishing clear boundaries for entry and exit often pose problems unique to its medium.
Agreeing on a point of entry is difficult; although one person may initialize by sending a message to a friend who is online, the friend could either be away from the computer, be occupied with another project online, wish to wait awhile before responding, or simply choose not to respond. One way in which AIM deals with this situation is that users have the option of having a noise sound when a message is received. In this way, a friend’s invitation for entry into conversation can always be clearly known.

In instant messaging, one person could also quickly terminate conversation without warning. With regard to this issue, AIM maintains the automatic away message. Although the user has not explicitly posted a message to establish his status as “Offline”, when a message is sent to him another one appears indicating his status as well as the time in which he signed off. However, if the user has simply chosen to not respond while still being online, the exit is ambiguous; his friend could sit at the computer for several minutes waiting for a reply. A similar situation occurs when a conversation lags without both parties having signed off. At this point, no clear exit has been agreed upon. When one person eventually decides to go offline, he now does not know whether to simply indicate his exit by signing off or to explicitly send a message saying goodbye.

In addition, each phrase of the instant messaging conversation follows a similar pattern to face-to-face conversation as described by Clark, being “aperiodic, unbalanced, and alternating” (87). However, while in speech exits are helped in their indication by intonation, in instant messaging the exit for each phrase has to be clearly designated with either syntax or the passage of time. This is due to the fact that conversational turns do not end when one message is sent. For example, if someone receives the message “I am going to Alaska this summer”, he would probably wait for a few seconds to see if it is followed by another phrase. If enough time has passed, he would respond with a message such as “That’s great!” However, if the first message was followed by “What are you doing?” to clearly indicate its exit, the user would not have to wait before responding.