Via the very interesting Sociolinguistics and CMC blog (where btw I hope to be able to contribute more actively in a less stressful future), I have found the Shegloff Publications Archive with links to a great number of Emanuel A. Schegloff articles. This will certainly be useful for future references.

You know how difficult it is to capture everything you want to say in a conference presentation, especially if you want to make it detailed enough to get valuable feedback? The national work-in-progress seminar that I visited in Stockholm last week was really great, and one of the reasons why it was so successful was precisely that there were no such mini-presentations. Instead we prepared by reading whole texts (or excerpts) and each text was assigned a first and second reader. Apart from the comments I get from my supervisor on my work-in-progress, the comments I got here were by far the best I have ever received. I will not go over everything here, but there is one thing I wanted to continue discussing.

Something that I had not really thought about myself before is the way in which I refer to face-to-face interaction in my article. I write that one advantage with the affordances approach is that “in this approach it is not claimed that face-to-face interaction is always the most efficient way of communicating, and instead the mediated environments are investigated in their own rights”, yet, as was pointed out to me, I keep comparing with face-to-face interaction. This is an inconsistency that I need to deal with. Spontaneously, I think I will continue comparing with face-to-face – after all this is the communication mode that most people will see as default, and the environments I refer to in this study all have voice interaction and in a sense try to replicate face-to-face in one way or another. It also appears as if most beginner users in these environments take it that face-to-face conventions should apply also here. So, instead of creating a completely new system for comparison I am using face-to-face as a point of reference, and as long as I clearly state that there is no evaluative judgment in this choice I do not think this should be a problem. Or what do you think? Would you recommend me to take this route – to argue that face-to-face is not always better, yet at the same time compare with face-to-face? I would be grateful for any comments on this, of course!

Update: This whole post had to be rewritten with regards to the use of abbreviated forms, since in the new version of MT that we’re using, apostrophes end up as strings of code… Hmm. Maybe I should be happy, since it appears that the new affordances of the medium steer me towards a more academic, professional writing style . Hope it will be fixed soon, so that I can be myself again…

Another update: It appears that it’s not the apostrophe per se that’s the problem, but rather these messy entries occur when I copy and paste my text from Word… Annoying nonetheless…

When working with my article to be discussed at the national WIP symposium in Stockholm later this week, I have come to realize that it is quite problematic to decide on how to define communicative affordances. If we look at Norman

Today the annual AoIR conference begins in Chicago: IR 6.0 Internet Generations. I would so have liked to be there! The second best thing will be to try and follow the online reporting from the event. This year they seem to have put a lot of effort into setting up for the virtual side of things, which should be great for those of us who cannot attend.

From what I can tell when looking through the abstracts there will be lots of presentations on blogging at this years conference. Apart from these, some which I really would have liked to see include a presentation and a panel on voice interaction online: