Information Recovery in Text-Only Discourse
After my post the other day about AIM's "Your Buddy has Entered Text" message, I started getting some hits from people searching for AIM related things, and I clicked through to a Yahoo results page from one of the searchers. Thre, I found a link to this paper. It's a decently long read, and I've only made it part way throguh so far, but it's interesting, in a communication geek type of way.
Starting with Clark's description of the structure of embedded join projects, this article attempts to examine the changes that occur in the structure of discourse when the only medium of interface is text. To do so, a modern on-line "instant messenger" (IM) system is used to provide transcripts of text-only conversations. A standard convention of IM conversation is the use of what I call recovery devices: textual utterances which are intended to provide information present in face-to-face conversations which is lacking in IM conversations. Using the ability of IM software to integrate a recovery device into the conversation interface (via a feature called Direct Connect), I find that the device makes a statistically significant improvement in IM conversation orderliness.