Grounding in Communication
From ThesisWiki
Contents |
Authors
Herbert H. Clark, Susan E. Brennan
Overview
The authors present the idea of grounding -- the "mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions -- as essential for communication between two people. They begin by discussion face-to-face conversations but extend the discussion into technologically mediated methods of communication. The two factors that influence the acceptance of grounding are purpose and medium.
A lot of the paper relates to what I'm doing in my project. The first section that got my attention was how people seek positive evidence in grounding; they seek to verify that their communication has been received and understood. This is done in three ways:
- Acknowledgments
- Continuers
- uh huh, yeah (phatic, or back channel responses)
- m (British)
- Continuers
- Relevant next turn
- adjacency pairs
- when one pair is on the floor the second pair is expected
- adjacency pairs
- Continued attention
- eye contact
- turning towards someone
The other section that I think I'll be returning to throughout my project is "Constraints on Grounding," which lists 8 constraints that a medium may impose on communication between two people:
- Copresence
- A and B share the same physical environment
- Visibility
- A and B are visible to each other.
- Audibility
- A and B communicate by speaking.
- Cotemporality
- B receives at roughly the same time as A produces.
- Simultaneity
- A and B can send and receive at once and simultaneously.
- Sequentiality
- A's and B's turns cannot get out of sequence.
- Reviewability
- B can review A's messages.
- Revisability
- A can revise message for B.
For example:
- Answering machines: Audibility, reviewability
- E-mail: Reviewability, revisability
- Telephone: Audibility, cotemporality, simultaneity, sequentiality
Every media has a different set of constraints that it imposes on grounding and there are costs associated with different sets of capabilities. Understanding and designing for these costs helps people to establish grounding in a particular medium.
Reflection
The author's framework for discussing constraints that various mediums impose on grounding could be really useful to me. In my model of existing projects I have chosen synchronicity and explicitness but using these 8 terms could help me understand them better.
In contrast to the goal of the authors I may not be seeking to reduce all "costs" to the people communicating because I am not designing a replacement communication medium but a complimentary one. I think it will be important to consider specifically how my design meshes with existing mediums by using these vectors to evaluate wholes in the potential for grounding.
I'll probably continue to return to this paper I my project progresses.
