Assignment #2 - Featured Post

Last week's featured post is by Yan, who analyzed away messages in the context of Grice's cooperative principle and four maxims. Its a really nice summary of the concepts, and his application to away messages is intriguing . Yan speculates that the odd content of many away messages violate the maxims. Yan notes that the very presence of an away message may accomplish the maxim goals. As Evan and Helena point out in their comments this allows the content of the away messages to fulfill other communicative goals, such as self-expression.

Assignment 2B - Maxims and away messages

Grice believes that communication functions because of the cooperation between the parties involved in the conversation. A speaker says the literal words that he is thinking, but at the some time makes implicatures, things that a sentence is able to convey, but are not mentioned explicitly in the sentence. It is the job of the listener has to somehow figure out what the speaker meant to say. To facilitate this, Grice proposes that we use four maxims as guidelines when we speak. The maxims that he proposes are the maxim of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The maxim of quantity states that the speaker says only as much as necessary. The maxim of quality dictates that we should only say things that we think are true based on good evidence. The maxim of relevance says that we should only say things that are relevant to the conversation at hand. Finally, the maxim of manner is accomplished simply by speaking without purposely making the sentence hard for the listener to understand.

With the exception of flouting maxims as a literary technique, these maxims seem to work pretty well within spoken communication, and they seem to hold pretty well for most of our new technologies because in all of these mediums, efficiency of communication is still the key. However, I believe that there is an exception to the rule which regularly violates all four of Grice’s maxims: away messages.

I will use “the speaker” to refer to the person who is putting up the away message from here on. In principle, the speaker puts up an away message to inform others that he is not at the computer or is busy. In most cases, the generic “I am away from my computer right now” message follows the four maxims perfectly. It follows the maxim of quantity because it provides information that the speaker are away from the computer, the maxim of quality because he (presumably) really is away from the computer, the maxim of relation because the other party most likely would like to know not to expect a response from the speaker, and the maxim of manner because it is a courteous and concise way of conveying a message.

Even with the generic away message, we can start to see that there may be problems with the maxim of quality because someone could put up that away message just because he doesn’t want to chat at the moment, rather than truly being away from the computer. Since Internet access is so simple these days, many people find it easier to leave their computers on and their instant message clients connected all the time. Away messages are being used more and more often, and in order to add some uniqueness into away messages, people have started to use creative and witty away messages, which sometimes have absolutely nothing to do with the speaker being away.

Just taking a quick glance down my buddy list, I see away messages like “Easy like making mac and cheese right?” This clearly violates every single maxim. If I had simply received this message without knowing that it was supposed to be an away message, it wouldn’t tell me anything. It doesn’t convey any information that the speaker is away, it is hard to justify the maxim of quality for this message because I have no idea what it is referring to, it is definitely not relevant to the fact that the speaker is away, and in fact, it seems like the sentence is structured to be somewhat confusing.

It seems that it is once again the technology itself that lets us get away with things like this. If I click on someone’s profile on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), the yellow icon lets me know that an away message is being displayed. If I actually go ahead and message that person, AIM responds with a message saying “Auto-response from xxxx”. In effect, the technology takes care of all four maxims, and no matter what the speaker puts into the actual body of the away message, the fact that he is away is always clearly conveyed. Indeed, even a blank away message would serve that purpose. Because of this, the body of the away message is often used as a tool of self expression rather than as something informative