A#7 - Away Messages

M1: work..leave me a cool voicemail or text msg for when im on break!

-This message has two speech acts: an assertive and a directive. The assertive is the statement of “work,” which is a fact that this person is working. The rest of the message is a command for people reading the away message to do something. The CMC convention used is “msg.” No common ground was used in this away message.

M2: scheduling/homeworking

-This is an assertive as it states facts about what this person is doing. No CMC conventions or common ground used.

M3: It's always the crazy times...

-This is a quotation from a song. Common ground of the song is needed to know this, though upon speaking with this person, I found out the person didn’t expect anyone to know anything about the song. The common ground is therefore in knowing (as I did) that this person almost always quotes a song in his/her away message.

M4: First day back and already going nuts!!!!

-This message has two speech acts: an assertive and an expressive. The assertive is the assertion of the fact that it’s this person’s “first day back,” while the expressive is the showing of emotion about “already going nuts.” There are no CMC conventions or common ground used.

M5: classes, errands, lifting

-This is an assertive about activities this person is doing. There are no CMC conventions and common ground is needed to know that “lifting” means lifting weights.

I found it fairly easy to code for the speech acts. Simply determining which speech act is being used is not very difficult. Determining common ground language conventions was a little more difficult, as it can be unclear if some conventions are meant to include a specific audience with common ground (for example, a sentence like “I’m eating bananas” could be an inside joke and/or refer to the person’s current action as an assertive). However, determining the CMC conventions was straight forward. Determining humor must be very difficult considering the common ground aspect of humor as well as the fact that there is no way for the person writing the message to show he/she was trying to be funny – it’s a product of common ground and the reader’s personality and mood.

The approach taken in this paper overlooks a few keys elements of away messages, partly through oversimplification. For one, the idea that speech acts alone are useful seems to be an oversimplification. The use of punctuation, capitalization, fonts, text and background colors, emoticons and even text-based drawings, are not included in this analysis. These other parts of away messages can add emotion – an effective of sorts – to even the simplest of assertives. For example: lifting? Lifting :-<>

Overlooking declarations may have been troublesome as well. What if a person is announcing the winner of his SECRET NCAA tournament pool? That would be a verdictive. The same goes for effectives, as a person could easily announce: “Edit meeting at 7 or you’re fined,” having instructed someone or some people to check the away message.

I found the idea that participating in activities would create more common-ground-based messages to be a tenuous one. Just because one could use away messages for expressions doesn’t mean one would want to express your inside jokes with activity groups to the whole world. Furthermore, away messages are likely to be directed at people who would talk to you online, and participation in an activity doesn’t mean you would normally talk to those people who are in the activity with you online.

It makes sense to me that assertives would be the most commonly used speech act, and I think the conclusions about the functions of away messages were also very accurate. However, I think that the analysis of humor would have better been served by asking the participant post-analysis if there was humor intended. (Is that okay, showing the participants which messages were analyzed?)