In Monk’s article, there is a discussion about Conversation Structure, and more specifically, Topic Mention. According to the article, McCarthy (1993) noted that text-based communication had much less order than face-to-face spoken conversation. Specifically, new topics would begin before the last topic was resolved, causing disorder to text-based communication. McCarthy and Monk suggest that text-based conversation can sustain multiple topics at a time because there is a written account to review past conversation, whereas in face-to-face, there is no record. Once spoken, a face-to-face comment is rarely saved. Thus, recalling one topic’s comments while engaging in another topic simultaneously can be confusing in a face-to-face context. To measure orderliness, McCarthy and Monk measured the distances between references to the same topic. For my assignment, I decided to analyze two brief conversations - text-based communication and face-to-face conversations – and compare for topic distance differences. I hypothesized that, if McCarthy and Monk’s measure is correct, I should see greater differences between topic references in text-based communication compared to face-to-face communication. It was difficult finding technology-media examples, so I chose to examine AIM and face-to face conversations discussing technology.
Text-Based Conversation
- Person A: He hasn’t been on ICQ this week, do you know why?
- Person B: I wouldn’t know, I only use AIM
- A: I think he’s avoiding me
- B: Why would he do that?
- A: Well, he hasn’t answered my text either
- B: People still use ICQ?
- A: Yeah, some people still use ICQ…out of the
- B: Why would he be avoiding you?
Lines 1,3,4,5, and 8 deal with one topic, while a second topic, using AIM vs ICQ is seem in 2, 6,and 7. This is a large distance from 2 to 6 – large than in the face-to-face conversation. This supports McCarthy and Monk’s idea that distances will be greater in text-based conversation
Face-to-Face Conversation
- Person A: Have you ever heard of Second Life?
- Person B: No, what’s that?
- A: It’s a virtual community with avatars…similar to a game except you can’t win
(laughter)
- B: How’d you get into that?
- A: I didn’t really…I heard about it though a class and I ended up doing a project on it
- B: I have so many projects this semester
- A: how many?
- B: more than you can imagine
Lines 1,2,3,4, and 5 deal with one topic, and then the conversation shifts in 7 and 8 to a new topic and continue from there. This supports McCarthy and Monk for two reasons. First, it confirms my hypothesis that distance between topics is greater in text-based compared to face-to-face communication. Additionally, this conversation exemplifies McCarthy and Monk’s idea that face-to-face conversations have my topic organization, meaning one topic is discussed, and when it is resolved, a new topic begins
4 comments:
Interesting; and nice to see your hypothesis was proven true. It makes sense that topic distance would be greater in CMC since the record means that you can refer back to previous sentences to understand the current ones. It also allows multiple topics to be carried on at once since the conversation log means that the participants don't have to hold everything in memory.
It would be interesting to see whether there's a saturation limit of sorts to this; i.e., how many topics can be carried on simultaneously across instant message before even having the conversation history on display doesn't help anymore. Alternatively, it'd be cool to see what happens when a lot of people talk in CMC, like in a chatroom; in that case, I'd wonder whether all the messages from all the different people would again overwhelm the history log.
Good study, good conclusion. Makes a lot of sense that less topics would be covered FTF than in CMC
FtF definitely makes drifting between topics more awkward. It's much more difficult to keep multiple conversation topics in short term memory than it is to read them back from the chatlog in a CMC environment. I wonder how hybrid approaches might affect this effect. For example, computer mediated communication with both voice communication and a shared white board might allow discussion topics to stay active longer like in text-based CMC.
I found similar results to my experiment involving text vs verbal speech topics. When i really sat down and thought about it, the common theme of more disorder in text is true in almost every sense. Every AIM convo ive ever had is all over the place in terms of consistent topics.
Another interesting thing i was thinking about would be comparing telephone to face to face communication under the context of order. I bet even more order will be seen in face to face communication due to the greater amounts of non verbal signals that could be used to keep a conversation on track. I would also bet that even within the realm of text, different mediums offer different amounts of order (i.e. email vs IM, email vs text messaging etc).
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