Away messages are silly

Five away messages

1. Ya nye znayu tochni li vesi, no mnye nye xochet'sya ikh proveryat'. Mnye slishkom nravit'sya eta kartina. (i don't know if the scales are accurate or not, but I don't want to check them. I like the picture too much.) — (quotation)


2. "It's not a beer belly, it's a fuel tank for a sex machine!" — (quotation)


3. b-bALL — assertive (?)


4. nevermind the gym....relaxing before tarble and the library.... — assertive / commissive


5. hmm, monday...and i'm not in the mood for ta-ing today either... — expressive / commissive

(1) is a quotation from the Russian song "Vopros" by the group Кино. It was transcribed as it is shown here. It may be a comment on what the speaker is feeling, in which case it would be an expressive act; it may be a statement of what music the speaker is listening to at the moment, in which case it would be an assertive act; or it may be something else entirely.

(2) is another quotation which I can't properly source. It seems to be a popular phrase intended as a joke. As with (1), it may be a statement with any number of actual meanings, but I cannot readily conceive of an intended meaning that would involve a speech act of a type other than assertive.

(3) is difficult to understand; it appears to assert that the reason that the speaker is (nominally) away from their computer has something to do with basketball. It could be that they are interested in a game which is currently being played, that they have a passive interest in some series of games being played or the sport as a whole, that they are involved in playing a game, that they would wish to play a game, &c. Without further context, it is not possible to determine the exact meaning of the content of the message.

(4) is a simple assertive message stating why the speaker is absent. It is also, after a fashion, commissive, as it states the speaker's intended future location (and, to those in the know, activity).

(5) is expressive, stating the speaker's feelings towards the day and the activity in which they are (presumably) obliged to partake. It also has a commissive character, implying that the speaker is obliged to act in some capacity as a TA on Mondays and will, however grudgingly, fulfill this obligation.

With respect to the Nastri in general, I take greatest issue with the stated assumption that categories of speech act are mutually exclusive. This is shown to be questionable by (4) and (5), above, as there is implicit meaning in a given assertive or expressive statement that commits the speaker to some future action if the assertive or expressive aspect of the message is taken to be true. It may be argued that the primary meaning of a message is of one character or another, but the acknowledgement of primary versus perhipheral meaning already throws mutually exclusive character of speech acts into question. One might also argue that a speaker may intend only to make a particular speech act with a given utterance and that other meanings are simply implications of the statement making the act, but such an argument needs to take into account intentionally ambiguous statements and statements which, arguably, have no proper interpretation as a speech act.

It seems that many away messages do not have content that is of any significant value. For a given away message this may be the case in general, or it may be that an away message has informational content for a subset of those who may read it and is nonsensical for all others. Take, for example, an away message not listed above because it is impossible to categorize without further context:

Coolyss (12:41:58 AM): ok hold your breath ok

Coolyss (12:42:00 AM): i'm going to tell you

Coolyss (12:42:05 AM): i burp sometimes

This may be meaningful to those who are mutual friends of the one posting this away message and of Coolyss, but otherwise it does not carry much significant informational content at all. When such an away message is posted, whether it be a quotation intended to edify or an inside joke to which the reader is not privy, the content of the message is less important than the symbolism of being away and having posted such a message. Writing an away message involves taking into account the ability of those reading it to understand it; part of this process of comprehension involves being able to ground the message properly. Much as I won't write an away message in proper Russian because I know that no one using the stock AIM client can read Cyrillic encoding, I won't write an away message that requires contextual knowledge which no one reading the message can be expected to have, if I want them to be able to understand the message's content. A message is intentionally difficult to ground or otherwise hard to understand may be called cryptic. It is possible to post a cryptic away message in order to elicit a response, but when the practice of posting cryptic messages becomes commonplace, it is impractical for actors with many buddies to follow up on the meaning of the content of a given message, and the content of the away message ceases to be as significant as the simple act of posting the message and choosing to give it cryptic content.

Categorization of utterances is not as simple as dividing them into mutually exclusive speech act categories. Furthermore, the analysis used in Nastri, et al, simply ignores the capacity for speech that references itself or its medium explicitly or implicitly in such a manner so as to make straightforward categorization of an away message dependent upon its recipient.