Assignment #7

Following are the five away messages I coded.

Away message 1: it feels like we've been back at school for longer than a week

This message is Expressive, because it is stating the feelings (exhausted, sick of school) of the girl who left the message. This message also includes common ground, because it requires the knowledge that she was a college student who had been on spring break two weeks ago.

Away message 2: around until chess club...

This message is Assertive, because it states what the author was doing at the moment. It also includes a common CMC convention, ellipses, which help to provide ambiguity about what the person is actually doing at the time, or where they actually are.

Away message 3: I'm here leave me a message

The first part of this message is an Assertive, and the second part a Directive. The first part states where he is, and the second part tells the reader how they “should” react, by leaving him a message.

Away message 4: away game...be back around 6 or 7ish

This message is also Assertive, stating what the user is doing at the moment, and giving information about when he will return. This message includes common ground, requiring the knowledge that he plays on a baseball team. This also includes ellipses, a CMC convention, but also just a form of shorthand.

Away message 5: zzzzzzz

This message is again Assertive. It states, indirectly, that the user is sleeping/napping. It includes a CMC convention, intentional misspelling. This isn’t really a word, but simply an attempt at conveying a sound, in text.

Coding these messages for the different types (Assertive, etc) was not too difficult, and I think that the 6 different categories do a good job at breaking the away messages up into the different meanings they have, and the different reasons people having for using away messages. By eliminating quotes, you find that most Assertives are simply statements of what a person is doing at that moment. The fact that the majority of away messages were Assertives supports the idea that an important function of away messages is to note availability, and to indicate virtual presence (or absence). I feel that adding quotes into the analysis would have brought in more interesting and complicated results.

Common ground and CMC conventions were both slightly more difficult, and complicated. Common ground can be found in many different types of messages, and it is not very clear what common ground in away messages indicates. Although I observed two messages which seemed to contain common ground, the messages would still be understandable, to a slightly lesser degree, to someone who did not share this common ground. So, perhaps common ground is simply a shortcut, so people do not need to elaborate with unnecessary details; people might try to write messages that the most people can understand, while putting forth the least amount of effort, and this might just bring about something that looks like common ground.

CMC conventions were also present in many of my observed messages, and the reason for this was also not very evident. In two examples, people used ellipses, but for apparently very different reasons (ambiguity and shorthand). Also, one person’s away message just was zzzzzzz. This could be looked at as a CMC convention, but it also is just a way of writing a sound we would make (snoring), that is associated with sleeping. Since I would guess that most people would interpret this message the way the user indicated, is he really using a convention? Or is this simply the right way to write his intended message? This away message is much more complicated than it appears, and the way it is coded does not give a good indication of what the away message actually is. It is much more interesting to consider how much we interpret this message, and get meaning out of a non-English string of characters.