A good way to talk. A comparative analysis of communication choices in China, Denmark and the US

ABSTRACT

The article presents a comparative analysis of how people manage ways of communicating with their social ties. It thereby makes a qualitative contribution to the social ties literature [Granovetter, 1973. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. doi:10.1086/225469], which is dominated by quantitative approaches. Specifically, the article maps different criteria that people consider when they combine the affordances [Hutchby, 2001. The communicative affordances of technological artefacts. In Conversation and technology, from the telephone to the Internet (pp. 13–33). Polity Press] of various types of communication in their interaction with different social ties. The qualitative analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork in China, Denmark and the US, adopting and adapting a shared interview-diary-interview method in each field site (Lai, S. S., Pagh, J., & Zeng, F. H. (2019). Tracing Communicative Patterns. Nordicom Review, 40(s1). https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-001.). Despite apparent sociocultural and infrastructural differences between the national contexts, we find that people, guided by universal aspects of sociality, share five criteria, namely efficiency, sensibility, ephemerality, insistency, and availability, that ground their everyday communications with both strong and weak ties.

KEYWORDS:

• comparative analysis
• social ties
• ethnographic fieldwork
• communication criteria
• technological afforances
• affordance theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data for this study were collected in the latter half of 2017, before the Covid-19 pandemic, and audiovisual communication (such as through Zoom, Teams or FaceTime) was not a pervasive way for the respondents to communicate, and it was only rarely discussed. It is clear that this type of communication has unique affordances that differ from the other three groupings, but our data do not reliably speak to these affordances, nor to how people consider them in their communicative choices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Carlsbergfondet [grant number Semper Ardens CF16-0001].

Notes on contributors

Jesper Pagh

Jesper Pagh is a Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Communication, where he studies issues of privacy in digital media as an associate of the 'Don't Take It Personal' research project. He has previously published on ethnographic approaches to the internet in everyday life, the history of the US internet, and individual practices surrounding digital communication.

Fiona Huijie Zeng Skovhøj

Fiona Huijie Zeng Skovhøj holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen where she participated in the international research project 'The Peoples' Internet' as a PhD Fellow. She has previously published on ethnographic approaches to studying the internet in everyday life, China's mobile internet, and Chinese Guanxi culture.

Signe Sophus Lai

Signe Sophus Lai is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Communication, where she studies datafication, digital infrastructures, and political economy of communication. She has previously published on digital control mechanisms and infrastructures, online tracking, media ethnography, digital methods, and communication theory.