Abstract
An Instant Messaging (IM) conversation is a dynamic communication register made up of text, images, animation and sound played out on a screen with potentially several parallel conversations and activities all within a physical environment. This article first examines how best to capture this unique gestalt using in situ recording techniques (video, screen capture, XML logs) which highlight the micro-phenomenal level of the exchange and the macro-social level of the interaction. Of particular interest are smileys first as cultural artifacts in CMC in general then as linguistic markers. A brief taxonomy of these markers is proposed in an attempt to clarify their frequency and patterns of their use. Then, focus is placed on their importance as perceptual cues which facilitate communication, while also serving as emotive and emphatic functional markers. We try to demonstrate that the use of smileys and animation is not arbitrary but an organized interactional and structured practice. Finally, we discuss how the study of visual markers in IM could inform the study of other visual conversation codes, such as sign languages, which also have co-produced, physical behavior, suggesting the possibility of a visual phonology.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on situated and shared practice of language organisation, cf. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1967.
- 2.
Another article in this volume of particular interest to studying visual cues is by Marcoccia and Gauducheau (2007) dealing with the oral-written dimension of smileys in discussion groups and emails.
- 3.
Cf: Baron, N. (2008). “Adjusting the Volume: Technology and Multitasking in Discourse Control”.
- 4.
Each session consists of multiple conversations. In a typical scenario, the user had three to ten different conversations for each session and therefore multiple XML log files.
- 5.
The duration was also influenced by the length of the video cassettes and the fact that the participants were in a cybercafé.
- 6.
In the search for subjects, we discovered that IM is considered a very private activity, and many people were unwilling to participate. Other subjects curtailed some of their more intimate exchanges first by announcing to their conversation partners that they were in a study and being recorded and by avoiding embarrassing subjects that may have arisen.
- 7.
In Japanese chat, ASCII smileys have a “frontal” point of view and are read vertically instead of horizontally.
- 8.
In a recent survey of instant messaging, Yahoo! found that 66% of the 40,000 IM users surveyed have memorized at least 3 text-character shortcuts for using emoticons, while 19% have memorized 10 or more, cf. http://blog.messenger.yahoo.com/blog/2007/07/10/emoticon-survey-results/ (accessed 28 October 2007).
- 9.
We opted against using a more “morphological” approach, in which the stem symbol is the base form of a round, yellow circle because identifying prefixes, infixes or suffixes proved more problematic, in particular, for smileys that are not based on the smiley face such as the rainbow or lips.
- 10.
The long breaks described by other researchers of IM did not occur in our sample study due to the fact that the participants were connecting from a cybercafé.
- 11.
- 12.
The video and screen capture data were recorded in a Parisian cybercafé (Bays et al., 2006, Avi4. 00 :23 :10).
- 13.
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Acknowledgments
The corpus used for this article was made possible by a grant from the French CNRS for the previous research project on Rhythm and Temporalities of Electronic Communication by Michel de Fornel, Maud Verdier and Hillary Bays. Special thanks go to Maud Verdier who diligently worked collecting a good portion of the data and on assembling the final report, to Michel de Fornel for some insight on recording electronic conversation using methods generally reserved for interaction studies and to Mickaëlle Lantin for digitalizing and organizing the video data.
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Bays, H. (2009). Visual Iconic Patterns of Instant Messaging: Steps Towards Understanding Visual Conversations. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_3
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