Cornell Language and Technology

exploring how technologies affect the way we talk, think and understand each other

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Assignment #5- Comparing Track 2 in ftf and cmc

I would like to compare the CNN Larry King Live interview with Jon Stewart, which was conducted face-to-face, and an online chat session with Oscar nominee Keira Knightley, using the ideas in the Hancock and Dunham article. I would like to focus on the differences in where mistakes are made in terms of Clark's levels of communication and the kinds of mistakes and corrections that appear.
Both of these transcripts represent media where turn-taking is established to at least some degree. In FtF, naturally, turn-taking strategies are fairly clear and easily implemented because of the richness of the medium. The chat session, with its less clear structure, nevertheless also has some turn-taking rules. Simply having to press Enter to send the message and the fact that messages from all recepients scroll down in a single window forces all messages into a certain format. These messages also remain in the chat window for the duration of the conversation (or, at least long enough to allow for multiple replies and clarifications). This format seems to keep Track 2 utterances to a level nearly as low as in the FtF interview. What may also contribute to this is the relatively high level of formality- people talking with a movie star try to lay out their thoughts clearly and don't limit themselves to short, ambiguous messages.
The kinds of communication errors that do happen clearly vary by medium. In the Larry King interview, the errors were mostly at levels 3 and 4. Stewart almost always heard what King said, but may have misunderstood him and asked to clarify, as in this example:

KING: So, in other words this will be a set up?

STEWART: What will be a set up?

KING: The winners. You will know the winner before it's announced?

If this has been a chat conversation, Stewart may have been able to understand what King is talking about by looking back to words that could be understood as "this will be a set up". So he heard the message and asked for a clarification (moving up on the joint action ladder), but he was unable to refer to what he said earlier.
In the chat, on the other hand, there was confusion over low level issues related to turn-taking procedures:

jazz: KEIRA,can I ask a question?

monkaholic: Are you excited for the luncheon tomorrow??

Liera: Keira - are the film festivals fun? You went to Sundance last year didn't you?

Keira Knightley: go Jazz

Many Track 2 messages here were clarifications such as asking for permission to ask a question. Very little was miscommunicated, because once the text was sent it was either a complete sentence that could be understood or it was noticed by the message author, who then sent a correction.
To summarize, it seems to me that different media can have nearly equal numbers of Track 2 messages, but their content and intent will be different. FtF is more likely to have higher-level problems and corrections, while CMC offsets the severity of low-level problems through message persistance.

1 Comments:

At 10:00 PM, Blogger Evan said...

I like what you said about FtF inherently having more Track 2 utterances than CMC. However, I think it's important that you qualify this statement by noting that it's only the case in text-based conversations like the one you examined. With other methods of CMC, you might find completely opposite results. For example, you saw how hard it was to understand Jeff in class when he used videoconferencing to talk to us. If he were there in person, the discussion would have undoubtably moved much more smoothly. CMC can aid understandability, but it can hinder it, as well.

 

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