Managing Mutual Orientation in the Absence of Physical Copresence: Multiparty Voice-Based Chat Room Interaction

Abstract

This study investigates the interactional work involved in ratifying mutual participation in online, multiparty, voice-based chat rooms. The purpose of this article is to provide a preliminary sketch of how talk and participation is managed in a spoken communication environment that comprises interactants who are not physically copresent but are engaging in and disengaging from conversations with high regularity. This distinctive feature of chat rooms provides a unique opportunity to examine how communication is shaped by technological affordances and constraints, an issue important to a number of different areas of study, including discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication. The analysis examines two aspects of interaction that are germane to participating in chat rooms: summons–answer exchanges and verbal alignment. The findings show that talk in chat rooms does not simply happen but is preceded by highly organized, complex, and collaborative interactional work aimed at establishing mutual orientation.

Notes

¹ Telephone studies have examined a number of different interactional issues, including topic organization (e.g., Drew & Holt, 1998), opening sequences (e.g., Schegloff, 1968), closing sequences (e.g., Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), preference organization (e.g., Pomerantz, 1984), repair organization (e.g., Drew, 1997), overlapping talk (e.g., Schegloff, 2000), and turn design (e.g., Walker, 2007). Investigations of telephone talk have also been used as a point of comparison for other electronic-based settings, including talk radio (Hutchby, 1999) and mobile telephones (Arminen, 2005; Hutchby & Barnett, 2005).

² At the time of writing, these chat rooms are unavailable.