Conversation analysis
Therese's post about communicative affordances and context made me curious about Hutchby's framework of studying computer-mediated conversations. To my surprise I found Hutchby's book among my library-books. I have a tendency of borrowing books at the library and then forgetting about them. Well, thanks to Therese I might actually read this one. Ian Hutchby uses conversation analysis to study technologically mediated communication. Which basically implies a methodological approach of recording naturally occurring interactions using audio and video equipment and then transcribing and analysing these conversations.The fortunate thing when studying computer-mediated communication is of course that you don't have to do any transcribing. In the actual analysis trying to interpret the meaning or motivation behind the utterances is not really considered to be a good thing, and I believe the researcher is supposed to be rather detached from the empirical material. I don't think I'm going to use conversational analysis in my possible analyses of IRC/IM-conversations or blog-posts (with comments), but Hutchby raises a few interesting and very relevant questions, as he discusses relations between "technologies of communication" and the nature of communication.
Btw1: Loughborough University's Conversation Analysis tutorial. Btw2: the ICCA06: International Conference on Conversation Analysis takes place in Helsinki, may 10-14 2006.
2 Comments:
hey I know it has nothing to do with this post but hey! you are the one interested in social relationship born on the internet, aren't you? So I wanna let you know that reading your blog and looking at your latest pics on flickr has recently caused me to have a freak dream in which I was hanging out at your place. The walls were all black an purple and you and your friends were diplayed in the big room your flat was composed of, as if you were a kind of strange statues. Being statues you were not that talkative but I was able to have some small talk with some of you anyway. Generally speaking you were all very thoughtful and nobody was willing to converse very much. I sometimes wonder what's inside this bloody head of mine. ciaoooooo
Oh, dreams are the coolest. Thanks for sharing. I actually had a rather stressful dream tonight. You know how it's sometimes hard to fall asleep? Well I dreamt I'd gone to bed to fall into endless sleep. Turned out it was pretty hard, and a week later I still lied there trying to die. Deadly frustrated but still alive. There were lots of things happening around and about, but far too complicated to remember clearly.
Though, I can assure you, despite being somekind of statue in your dream and with a wish to die in my own, I'm pretty alive and social and liking it :-)
Post a Comment