In this course, we are concerned with communication as it happens in real life, not as a theoretical assemblage of concepts and theories.Therefore, the capstone project for this course is a research paper that gives you the opportunity to examine a bit of actual, real, online text messaging between real people.
The idea here is to take the basic notions of co-presence, affordance, and the procedural organization of interaction and discover them in the actual communicative action people perform in online environments.
Though you are not doing a library research paper, you still need to cite all your sources, even if they are readings from the course, and provide a bibliography in the APA format.
In overview, I am asking you to describe, report on and analyze:
The data you are using.
The procedures used by actors to establish co-presence.
The relevant affordances of the chat technology that you can document as relevant in your data.
The sense-making procedures actors use to interpret each others’ postings, etc.
Using the data you collect, you are to describe:
1. Procedures used by actors to establish co-presence in the chat.
a. What do the actors do?
b. What affordances of the system make it possible for actors to establish co-presence?
2. How the technology is used to achieve social interaction and communication.
a. How do actors know when communication is happening?
b. In what ways do participants make known who the “speaker” is and who the recipients are?
3. The affordances of technology that impact social interaction and communication in the chat.
a. How can one actor keep another from posting?
b. What happens when an actor gets no response?
4. Some of the sense-making procedures actors use to interpret each others’ postings, etc.
a. Do all the postings make sense to all the actors?
b. What are examples of “unproblematic” exchanges? Why are they unproblematic? What went right?
c. What are some examples of problematic postings that participants find difficult to understand?
d. How are problems of understanding identified, addressed and managed in chats?
