Mark Aakhus and Stephen DiDomenico

19Language and interaction in new-media environments

Abstract: This chapter reviews key features and principles of language and social interaction as they apply to communication in new media environments. These include turn-taking, identity & face concerns, speech as action, expandability of sequences and activities, methods of coordination and repair, community and culturally bound assumptions about communication, and the emergent and dynamic outcomes of communication’s design. The review first attends to how these features and principles of face-to-face (FtF) interaction are evident in mediated communication in the way people adapt language use to the demands of communication and the mediated environment. Second, the review reverses ground to highlight how language use is implicated in technological design and thus how new media are part of a pragmatic web that extends features and principles of language and social interaction for communication across space and time. In this way, information and communication technologies, are important opportunities for insight into the nature of mediated communication. Central to this chapter is the view that technologically-mediated communication can be understood as linguistic and social practices for communication that are adapted to the demands of non-FtF environments.

Keywords: language, social interaction, media, Information technology, practice, design, design features, pragmatic web

1Introduction

There has been considerable interest in how language is used in the environments of interactive electronic media. Much of this interest is inspired by the fact that advances in information and communication technology create the possibility for interacting across time and space where co-presence may not be possible or even primary. Given that language itself evolved relative to face-to-face (FtF) interaction and that much of what is known about language use is based on FtF interaction, such an interest poses an important challenge to knowledge about these fundamental processes of human communication. It is not unusual for electronically-mediated communication82 to be understood as fundamentally new and different from FtF communication and that technology somehow determines these differences.

Another possibility, developed in this chapter, is that the role of technology does not necessarily lead to a fundamentally different understanding of language use for communication. Instead, the basic processes of human communication still operate while the practices for interacting and achieving communication may differ. New media may disrupt given forms and conventions of language use or afford disruptive opportunities to invent forms and conventions for achieving different qualities of communication across time and space. The apparent differences between FtF and mediated communication, and the varieties of communication particular to different media, may be manifestations of principles of communication that yet require further understanding. In this way, information and communication technologies are important opportunities for insight into the nature of communication and the process of how it happens.

There is yet a deeper point to consider, however, by conceiving of new media not as conduits of verbal exchange but instead as aspects of communicative context that is integral in how meaning making itself is accomplished. New media are thus implicated in verbal interaction and language use in two interrelated ways: First, uses of language are adaptations of communication principles to new media settings; second, new media settings materialize linguistic and social practices through technological means for achieving communication across time and space. Essentially, new media are technologies for communication that are extensions of human creativity in exploiting principles of language and interaction to achieve communication. This happens in the adaptations to new media environments but also in the design of new media environment, especially the pragmatic and argumentative web (Aakhus 2006; Schoop, de Moor & Dietz 2006; Singh 2002) where new media design plays a significant role in constructing forms of dialogue.

2Taking a language and social interaction (LSI) perspective

Across the many disciplines with interests in Language and Social Interaction (LSI), there is a shared curiosity regarding the primacy of the interaction order (Goffman 1983) and the uses of language in it. There is a particular emphasis on how language itself is systematically organized in a variety of ways beyond the units of word and sentence (see Leeds-Hurwitz 2010 or Tracy & Haspel 2004 for an overview of the LSI tradition from the perspective of the communication discipline). For instance, Jacobs (1994: 199) notes that discourse analysis “is an effort to close the gap between conceptions of communication process and language structure and function. Its research questions center on the role of language in constructing an ‘architecture of intersubjectivity’ (Heritage 1984; Rommetveit 1974).”

As Jacobs points out, when examined beyond the unit of the sentence, language patterns may be discovered at several different levels: conceptual structure that organizes content (texts, stories, conversational topics); pragmatic structure that organizes linguistic action and interaction (speech acts, adjacency pairs, conversational episodes); stylistic structure that integrates linguistic features with the characteristics of person and situation (style, codes, message design logics). Scholarship in LSI has investigated these patterns of language use in interaction and goes on to show that these patterns are not simply structures or mere conventions but instead bear some relationship to resolving puzzles of the interaction order and the achievement of intersubjectivity. Jacobs (1994) summarizes these as the puzzle of Meaning (How is it that people convey meaning in saying something or infer meaning from what has been said?); Action (How is it that people do things with words?); and Coherence (How is it that people coherently coordinate meaning and action?).

Patterns of language use reveal the creativity of individuals and collectives in finding ways to make communication possible. To understand the uses of language in interactive electronic media requires seeing this human creativity in exploiting principles of language and interaction to achieve communication across time and space. Research and theory related to LSI illustrates that new media become part of the pragmatics of interaction while pragmatist information systems research (e.g., Ågerfalk 2010; Golkuhl & Lyytinnen 1982) illustrates how language use is central to the creation and use of new media.

Aakhus and Jackson (2005) identify seven key facts about interaction drawn from LSI research that matter for language use and for technological design. While much recent attention has been given to verbal communication that occurs within a given kind of social media or information system (e.g., Ling 2008; Thurlow & Poff 2011; West 2013), these seven facts draw attention to how technologies for communication are not merely conduits through which messages are sent but implicated in the process of communication itself. Furthermore, these facts help articulate how technologies not only become intertwined in the pragmatics of communication but also enmeshed as agents in interactivity and the achievement of communication, thus revealing the two faces of language use in interactive media.

The review first attends to how what appears to be matters of FtF interaction are evident in mediated communication in the way people adapt language use to the demands of communication and the mediated environment. Second, the review reverses ground to highlight how language use is implicated in technological design and how new media are part of a pragmatic web that extends principles of LSI. We next discuss seven key facts about communication design by first considering the concept from its point of inception in LSI domain and then pointing to how it plays out in mediated settings.

3The pragmatics of electronically-mediated interaction

3.1Turn taking

Turn taking refers to speakers’ methods for coordinating who will take the speaking floor next, a recurrent, practical problem of everyday interaction (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson 1974). Conversation analysts have examined the regular practices through which conversational participants incrementally build speaking turns as well as manage their mutual access and sensemaking. Indeed, conversation analysis goes so far as to view turn-taking as the fundamental technology of interaction (Hutchby 2001; Sacks 1992). The ways in which interaction is arranged makes different social and epistemic resources available for the task at hand. Thus, as ordinary practices for taking-turns are suspended different institutional projects can be achieved (e.g., cross-examination, interviews, purchasing). The growing literature on talk in institutional settings has shown how variations in turn-taking formats generate different ways to construct and display relevant contributions to the activity at hand. Ordinary interactional conduct may be engineered by a range of institutional objectives, identities, and inferential frameworks (Drew & Heritage 1992; Heritage & Clayman 2010). In the context of dispute mediation, for instance, the turn-taking is altered through the involvement of a third-party mediator who disrupts ordinary turn-taking methods in a manner that focuses the disputants on resolving their disagreement (Garcia & Jacobs 1999).

Forms of new media, like different face-to-face contexts, bring forth their own sets of opportunities and obstacles for how participants go about making communicative contributions. Considerable attention has been given to new media as disruptive of ordinary conversational turn taking. According to Herring (2001), two core properties of the mediated environment typically lead to obstacles in how we coordinate interaction (cf. Herring 2013). The first, disrupted turn adjacency, occurs when the system may display messages to participants in a way inconsistent with the order in which they were constructed. In a classic study, Garcia & Jacobs (1999) described the “quasi-synchronous” nature of online chat, referring to the way in which the sequential placement of each typed contribution was dependent upon the degree of “lag” that came between message construction and being displayed. Similarly, Hutchby and Tanna (2008) examined how, due to the “technically mediated floor”, participants may be unable to mutually monitor each other’s construction of (text message) turns. This feature of the technology has consequences for how participants experience issues of simultaneous talk and overlap since they are unable to project when a speaker “holds the floor” or is finished with their turn until the message is transmitted from one user to another. 83

The second property discussed by Herring (2001) is the dearth of the type of feedback that is ordinarily encountered in face-to-face interaction, that which is relatively simultaneous and rich in audiovisual cues. Schönfeldt and Golato (2003), also examining online chat sessions, found despite this identified “lack” of conventional, fully synchronous feedback, the interactions still featured evidence of being finely coordinated and locally managed between participants. In the case of Hutchby and Tanna’s research, the aforementioned differences afforded for turn allocation procedures also shapes the way in which participants organize sequences of action. Unlike Sack’s principle of contiguity which posited a structural preference for responding to the last and most recent action within a multi-unit turn, the authors found that “complex format” (multiple action) text messages were managed by its recipients as a type of list and responding to them in the original (chronological) order in which they were composed (or “reproducing the action structure” of the original complex text, see p. 161).

Despite these overarching differences in how technically-mediated interaction may unfold, participants have generally adapted to such constraints by developing a variety of discursive practices for managing and displaying turn-to-turn relevance. One such practice, described by Werry (1996), is related to addressivity (cf. Bou-Franch, Lorenzo-Dus & Blitvich 2012; Sveningsson 2001). One way in which participants coordinate the transfer of speakership in FtF interaction is to explicitly select them (via proper names, eye gaze, or gestures such as pointing) as being designated to take the next speaking turn. Particularly in multi-party online chats, as Werry demonstrates, participants can adapt to the impoverishment of other interactional resources for turn allocation by specifying the addressed recipient of a particular message (e.g., “Kally I was only joking around”, see Werry 1996: 619). Weger and Aakhus (2003) made a similar contribution in describing the adaptability observed in online chat rooms dedicated to discussion about public issues. Given the core design features of the chat rooms – anonymous participants, turn-length limits, and continuous scrolling of the unfolding interaction – chat participants developed “work arounds” (including explicit mentioning of addressees) in order to facilitate the effective exchange of arguments about the issues under discussion (cf. Hutchby 2001).

A second practice used by participants is to preserve (or recreate) the intended turn position by “quoting” those participants to which the message is responsive to (Severinson-Eklundh 2010; Severinson-Eklundh & Macdonald 1994). Select portions of a previous message may be referenced or a simple copying and pasting of the earlier message in full, each of which roots the exchange via a larger process of contextualization. This practice is one means by which participants maneuver amidst the constraints imposed by communication designs and lends insight into how the quoting of prior interactional contributions84 may still serve as key resources for meaning making in mediated contexts.

While ICTs may disrupt ordinary turn taking, we can also see that people are inventive in figuring out means for making contributions in the circumstances at hand. Picking up on the spirit of the seminal paper by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974), technology invites research and theory to examine the speech-exchange systems that people invent for managing turn-taking under a wide variety of conditions.

3.2Identity & face concerns

Dating back to the groundbreaking work of Erving Goffman (1956, 1967), everyday interaction has been a key site for understanding processes of self-presentation and identity management (see also this volume, chapter 9). Identities are continually negotiated through the management of interactional activities at hand in dealing with the obligations and commitments of maintaining face. While doing so, they also manage competing communication goals, problems in understanding, and rights to specialized knowledge and expertise, just to name a few examples (Antaki & Widdicombe 1998). Participants’ concerns related to identity management are what Goffman called “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact” (1967: 5). This may in turn shape whether one chooses to participate in an interaction while the substance of what is actually contributed may be affected by concern for the identities of recipients. Both sets of considerations, along with various social and relational factors, contribute to how participants’ view what are permissible strategic and expressive choices. Further, this emphasizes identity as an active, situated accomplishment that is co-constructed between interlocutors in interaction (Mokros 1996).

Identity and face are omnipresent concerns for participants in interaction in any environment – mediated or otherwise. People adapt discursive practices to fit the particular constraints and affordances of technical spaces in order to manage their identities. Bernicot, Volckaert-Legrier, Goumi, and Bert-Erboul (2012) examined text (SMS) message exchanges between French-speaking adolescents for features of “SMS register” such as message length, dialogue structure, and discourse function (cf. Thurlow & Poff 2013). They found that individual-level characteristics – such as age, gender, and experience with the SMS medium – shaped some of the linguistic features of the interactions. Moreover, they found that users who were 15–16 years old were likely to avoid utilizing an opening or closing in their exchanges. In this way, identity was seen as evident in the way that the adolescents utilized particular adaptations to the technical constraints of the particular modality (i.e. using a particular “register”).85

Koshik and Okazawa (2012) conducted a conversation analytic investigation of various source of miscommunication in online library reference interactions between librarians and library patrons. Some of the core problems targeted by the participants were related to the differences in expertise across both identities (i.e. expert and novice). Golato and Taleghani-Nikazm (2006) demonstrated how online chat participants adapted to the technological constraints of the system to negotiate issues of face and social solidarity. Users were shown to still orient to practices of appropriate behavior and preference organization from FtF interaction through the ways that they structured and organized their turns. Further studies examining face and identity management in mediated contexts has addressed self-presentation in the “status updates” afforded by the social media platform Facebook (Lee 2011; Page 2010; West & Trester 2013). Common to each of these investigations is the manner in which people discover ways to make communication happen while also managing issues of identity and face.

Technologies and their implicit assumptions about communication play an important role in the ways people construct, manage, and challenge identities. Nonetheless, in cases where technical systems may constrain or prevent the enactment of certain identities, the natural instinct to achieve communication drives people to adapt to the affordances available. In the end, Goffman’s observations about self presentation still hold relevance for the interactional resources of mediated environments and how they become part of the method for communicating identity.

3.3Speech as action

Originally proposed in the lectures of J. L. Austin (1962), a speech act refers to the action that is performed through speakers’ use of language. Put simply, in saying things we do things. In doing things, we take on obligations and generate commitments (Searle 1969; Hamblin 1970). Since there is no necessary connection between utterances at the surface of talk, speech acts have been used as an analytic tool to describe how reasoning and shared background knowledge play a role in social organization. Social action is organized around the negotiation of obligations and commitments such that actions do not merely co-occur but bear a recognizable and accountable relationship to each other (e.g., questions/ answer; requests/ grant-denial). Although each of these commitments vary in their degree of explicitness in talk, each contributes to an evolving sense of “what is happening” among interlocutors. These insights are extended in studies that describe, for instance, the social organization of therapy (Labov & Fanshel 1977), large-scale businesses and bureaucracies (Winograd & Flores 1987), and argumentation (Jacobs & Jackson 1992).

The role of commitments and obligations in the organization of mediated communication has been examined in Lewinski’s (2010a; 2010b) analysis of online political deliberation. Lewinski’s analyses show that online discussions develop around the arguable elements of the propositional and pragmatic commitments to which contributors can be held accountable. Thus, despite the number of parties with divergent/diverging opinions and the asynchronous contributions, parties perpetuate polylogues by attending to meaning, action, coherence of contributions – and in particular to their emerging argumentation structure. This is not to say that contributions are typically reasonable but to say participants collectively exploit the potential for reasoning and mutual knowledge to engage each other – even across time and space.

Adopting a pragmatic understanding of language provides a window into the accomplishment of social action. Each of these activities, whether in face-to-face or mediated contexts, also carry different collateral commitments. Similarly, while technologies imply particular visions of the commitments important to its users, these may be resisted and challenged in how they go about actually using and adapting to their affordances.

3.4Expandability of sequences and activities

Many of the most fundamental activities involved in communicating often consist of series of type-related speech acts, or what Conversation Analysts have called adjacency pairs. These basic building blocks of interaction typically include some type of sequence-initiating speech act (e.g., request, invitation, greeting) followed by an adjacent and pair-related responding act (grant or denial, acceptance or rejection, greeting).86 Alternatively, Levinson (1979) has proposed the notion of “activity types” to refer to any form of culturally recognizable activity. These bounded events are also likely to hold constraints for settings, participants, and what constitutes an allowable contribution. Levinson’s idea helps explain why the communicative activities tied to, for instance, teaching young children, participating in a job interview, or attending a dinner party are likely to be quite distinct in communicative texture. The collateral commitments associated with sequences and the continual negotiation of speaker change thus create the potential for an indefinite expansion of communicative activity.

Activities may also be expanded in being sustained over time and space due to the affordances of technologies. The increasingly media-rich nature of social life makes a variety of forms of interaction possible. It appears, however, that this also calls for a further sense of expandability, one that looks beyond the immediate FtF sequential context of ordinary conversation. Communicative activities may also be expandable across different communicative modes – that is, across face-to-face and technologically-mediated channels for communication. Individuals may make use of (and invent) a constellation of communication channels (e.g., voice-based functions of mobile phones, text messages, instant messaging, email, etc.) to manage meaning and sustain relationships across iterative sequences of activity, thereby showcasing further ways in which people adapt to (and exploit) technological affordances for the purposes of communicating. DiDomenico and Boase (2013) discuss how the use of particular electronic devices (mobile phones), including the actions they are used to perform, can become woven into – and even prioritized over – the ongoing social fabric of the co-present interaction (cf. Licoppe 2012). They analyzed several ways in which these technologies can be attended to as a focal activity or one that is subordinate to the in-progress activity within the co-present encounter (cf. DiDomenico, Raclaw & Robles 2014; Raclaw, Robles & DiDomenico 2014).

As these studies show, the affordances of particular designs for communication may be used in concert with other sets of interactional resources. Although recent theoretical thinking about media multiplexity suggests relationships with strong ties can be reinforced using multiple media tools (e.g., Haythornthwaite 2002), work in anthropology has stressed how single events (e.g., dyadic conversations) may create or extend larger “chains” of interconnected speech activity (Agha 2007; Wortham 2005). A single interaction, then, may actually be extended and maintained over the course of multiple media channels (e.g., beginning as face-to-face, to mobile text messaging, then to social media platforms, etc.) while still comprising one coherent strand of meaning making (cf. Ling 2008; 2012). Thus, activities that humans sustain will enroll technologies as needed.

To summarize, sequences of speech activity are indefinitely expandable. Technological tools that support expandability supplement the human motivation to renew and extend possibilities for social action. Such uses and adaptation to particular designs for communication provide further support for the human drive to achieve communication. Nonetheless, there is still much to know about the complexity of the relationship between genres of communication and different media platforms and devices (e.g., Yates, Orlikowski & Okamura 1999).

3.5Coordination and repair mechanisms

Managing issues of alignment and mutual understanding are crucial for accomplishing any communicative activity – face-to-face or otherwise. Conversational repair refers to the retroactive attention and action to issues of problems of speaking, hearing or understanding among interlocutors (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; cf. Kitzinger 2013). The existence of discursive practices for repair reflects the larger demands of communication related to meaning, action, and coherence, among others. Moreover, repair further explains the importance of expansion and expandability in human communication (See the prior section).

Seminal research in the tradition of Conversation Analysis has documented the basic practices for implementing repair and coordinating interaction amidst signs of “interactional trouble” (Schegloff 1987). A core distinction in the literature is whether the repair is initiated by the speaker of the trouble source (“self-initiated repair”) or the recipients (“other-initiated repair”) as well as which of these parties provides a “solution” to the repair (i.e. “repair completion”) (Kitzinger, 2013). A related body of research in psycholinguistics has explored the role of language in building, sustaining and repairing “common ground” (Clark & Brennan 1991). This common ground is continually updated in interaction through what is referred to as a process of “grounding”.6 Across both analytic approaches, the coordination of repair and understanding in face-to-face interaction is understood to be an active and inherently collaborative accomplishment, while also requiring a shared repertoire of methods for negotiating these unfolding contingencies.

Participants’ methods for achieving repair in mediated contexts may be disrupted and even require new means for effective coordination. Suchman (1987) revealed a great deal of complexity with respect to this issue in a classic study of human-machine interaction. Findings indicated that the expert help system embedded within a photocopy machine lacked the ability to recognize or respond to signs of interactional trouble and thus became a clear obstacle for successful interactions with the technology. As this case suggests, some designs for communication technologies may have insufficient means for supporting the repair mechanisms that are typical of ordinary FtF interaction.

The reason the machine-human interaction worked, when it worked at all, was due to the extraordinary adaptability of the human user to the technological constraints. Participants of online chat sessions have been found to utilize “self initiated, self completed, same turn repair”, essentially meaning they edit their contributions before “sending” or adjust them in light of immediately prior postings for their interlocutors (Garcia & Jacobs 1999; Schönfeldt & Golato 2003). Schönfeldt and Golato (2003) further examined the sequential placement of chat users’ moves to initiate or complete repair sequences relative to the turn containing the trouble source (i.e., the repairable turn). In “next-opportunity repair” (i.e. after the turn containing the repairable has been sent), for example, the producer of the trouble source may provide a full repeat of the preceding turn with the error corrected (e.g., misspelling of a word, and other examples of repairables).

Although each of these repair techniques are approximations of their equivalent in face-to-face conversation, Schönfeldt and Golato also observed a trouble source unique to this context. This occurred when a participant’s speech act failed to receive a response from its recipient(s), leading to the participant orienting to the “silence” as either server-related issue or the recipient overlooking (or overtly ignoring) the turn and then initiating repair (cf. Rintel, Pittam & Mulholland 2003). Each of these cases of discursive adaptations and invention provide further support for how the limitations of the technology (in this case, the repairable turn being un-editable after being its being sent or ambiguity as to whether a recipient “received” a given contribution) may lead to participants’ creation of new techniques for repairing interactional road bumps (cf. Markman 2010).

Outside of practices for repair in face-to-face contexts then, people can create new techniques and procedures for dealing with interactional trouble. These practices are likely to be created with respect to both what the given technology affords and the activity that is to be achieved. Close examination of these repair-related activities in mediated contexts opens a further window to how participants draw from and adapt practices of face-to-face interaction in technology-abled interactions.

3.6Culture or community-bound assumptions

The Ethnography of Communication was developed as a lens for examining how communication is situated within larger systems of culture (Carbaugh 1988; Hymes 1974). The individual practices for accomplishing any speech act or more complex communicative activity may be dependent upon (and only be recognized with respect to) the cultural assumptions of the speech community (Fitch 1994). Philipsen (1975) revealed the different beliefs and ideals associated with a particular way of speaking, “talking like a man” based on ethnographic field work in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago and several middle-class neighborhoods on the west coast of the U. S. One finding of this work was that speakers’ membership in particular communities (as opposed to others) shapes what assumptions they hold about what are appropriate forms of talk and interpretation.

The maintenance of community-based expectations for communication is evident in mediated communication as well. Groups and communities jointly develop shared practices necessary for mediated communication to occur. Baym (1995) argued that community in computer-mediated contexts is best understood as “grounded in communicative practice” and created “through the interplay between preexisting structures and the participants’ strategic appropriation and exploitation of the resources and rules those structures offer in ongoing interaction” (p. 139). Along similar lines, Nilsen and Mäkitalo (2010) examined the relatively quick pace by which shared methods for interaction emerged during a five-week set of in-service trainings held online. Fairly early on in the training, participants displayed standard practices for selecting others as addresses, sequentially “tying” one’s turn to a previous turn through quotation, and waiting for one’s turn at talk. Thus, as Baym argued, establishing community is indeed a communicative possibility in these mediated spaces.

Adopting a view of online community as grounded in communicative practice draws attention to members’ conventions and their active co-construction in managing the interaction order, thus producing particular forms of communication. Technology is often seen as a cause of communication behavior, but the cultural approach advances understanding of how technologies are rendered functional despite the shortcomings of the mediated setting. Aakhus and Rumsey (2011), for example, show how the online practice of “flaming” can be explained as discourse phenomena as opposed to simply being a product of social cues filtered out by technology. Their analysis of an online cancer support group’s flame war revealed deeper struggles within the community about normal supportive communication. Specifically, the community conflict was about competing local ideals for interaction about the right to criticize, the right to vent, and the value of disagreement in communicating support.

To summarize, online groups and communities can be seen as working to develop and regulate their own local assumptions about interaction. So, one can see that a larger collective understanding of how the shared practices of engagement should be used may overrule such communicative possibilities. It is this type of community ethos that is crucial for understanding how people use (and adapt to) the affordances and constraints that are tacit in technological systems.

3.7Outcomes of communication designs are emergent and dynamic

A critical component of mediated communication lies in the classic tension encountered in theorizing about human social behavior between the role of pre-determined plans (or “scripts”) for communication and the spontaneous, emergent unfolding of social life [1] (Sawyer 2001; Suchman 1987). Despite how a technology may be designed for use, participants’ actual application of it in practice may be entirely different. That is, rather than following the plan of the technology, communication emerges in a distinct manner grounded in local contingencies. Technologies are interventions that correspond in important ways to how social institutions may place conditions on communication such as goals, relational status, and epistemic aims (Hutchby 2001; Silverman 1998). As a type of intervention, designs for communication may reflect incongruence with participants’ ordinary ways of accomplishing activities, essentially “getting in the way” of their work. This reveals an orientation, even a theory, toward communicative conduct yet one that is not apparent until it is realized in use (Aakhus & Jackson 2005; Aakhus 2002; Hopper 1992; Poole & DeSanctis 1990).

People develop technology-related workarounds. Hopper (1992) discusses the telephone access war and the conditions of caller hegemony that people accommodated to in introducing the telephone into daily practice. Workarounds were developed for this technology as evident in the variations from the canonical sequence of greetings in telephone conversations. Devices and systems may lead to the development of new policies or procedures. Hopper’s work also shows how technological innovations address the very imbalance initially generated by the telephone. Thus, access is enabled by technical innovations (cf. Aakhus 2013).

We also see such processes in technologies such as the social media platform, facebook. Lee (2011) adopted an ethnographic perspective to examine the communicative functions and localized practices related to facebook status updates. Facebook is a rich case for thinking about the emergence of adaptive practices to designs as it has gone through numerous system modifications in a relatively short time period of time. Initially, its interface for status updates were explicitly framed as a response to the question “What are you doing right now?”, though a given user’s response was constrained by the inclusion of their first name and the verb “is” being automatically inserted into the beginning of the message (e.g., “Stephen is working”). This “update prompt” has gone through several changes since then, with the removal of the obligatory “is” and the overall question shifting to “What’s on your mind?” (see Lee 2011: 111). In addition to the basic prompt, several other features have been introduced to foster further opportunities for participation including a chat function (Meredith & Stokoe 2014) and the “Comment” and “Like” functions within status update threads (West & Trester 2013; cf. Page 2010, West 2013).

With workplace technologies, it is important for designers to carefully consider participants’ ordinary routines and expectations for the activities the technologies are intended to model or supplement. As Hutchby (2001) notes, a technological system “tends to impose a logic on the course of the interaction which does not arise from local circumstances and which thereby disables participants from carrying out situationally appropriate ways of dealing with [these issues]” (p. 144). In some cases, then, designers may fail because of the rigidity imposed by the technology and its inability to accommodate the local contingencies of particular speech events. Whalen (1995) examined how the computer systems designed to aid emergency dispatchers actually hindered the processes of their workflow. With dispatching emergency personnel, call takers may need to take into account the context-dependent circumstances of the area such as the current traffic conditions on a potential driving route. The work of Suchman (1987) also supports this point in her analysis of how the design of a photo-copy system was at tension with employees’ ordinary, habitualized work routines.

Each of these cases reinforces the importance of designers’ attention to the intrinsically emergent nature of human sociality. They also expose the fact that there is a relationship between the technology, technology designer(s), and the users of a technology. Ordinary interactants not only attend to the affordance a technology offers for pursuing communicative aims, but also the prospect that technology implementation can enforce forms of talk and interaction (e.g., Aakhus 2013).

As Hutchby (2001) noted, a core distinction to be made here is the ad hoc nature of face-to-face interaction where conversational interlocutors may carry out local methods that are directly situated around the ongoing courses of action. In contrast, designers’ modeled expectations for what should transpire when problems arise may be in conflict with users’ local needs. It is in this manner that technologies serve as a type of intervention in having the potential to create a disconnect with what participants actually experience as part of the communication process.

4Perspectives and conclusions: How is language use implicated in technological design?

It is evident that in the uses of new media, as summarized above, that technologies become part of the pragmatics of human communication. The new opportunities for interacting across time and space introduced by new media do not appear to eliminate principles of language and interaction but instead the technologies are rendered useful by adaptation of these principles to the new media conditions. This can result in new forms of behavior, such as the use of emoticons and hashtags and other inventions for making mediated communication work. The pragmatics of language and interaction, however, are implicated in technology in another way as new media materialize linguistic and social practices through technological means for achieving communication across time and space.

Goldkuhl and Lyytinen (1982; Lyytinen 1985) recognized long ago that ICTs and information systems are social and linguistic systems that are technically realized. ICTs and Information Systems are bundles of categories and rules that associate categories that in turn define roles and relationships among people (Bowker & Star 1999). In this sense, ICTs are relational as technological infrastructures propose, and are used to discipline, the ways in which people relate to each other and to machines (Star & Ruhleder 1996). By affording communication to happen among dispersed actors, information technologies contribute to the institutionalization of forms of talk and action. Technical systems are thus social practices in the sense that they have actability – that is perform actions (Goldkuhl & Ågerfalk 2002) – and that they are metacommunicative – that is they signal how to engage in a particular activity (Goldkuhl 2006).

As social practices for relating people to people, technologies for communication are hypothesis about how to orchestrate interactivity to achieve (or prevent) forms of communication (Aakhus 2002; Aakhus & Jackson 2005). Hypotheses about communication that may or may not work. The point is illustrated in a classic analysis of the use of group decision support systems (GDSS) by diplomats. Lyytinen, Maaranen and Knuuttila (1994) described how diplomats worked around the presumptions about communication by a decision support system that communication is transparent, information exchange. But in order to go about their business, diplomats required support for their subtle negotiation of meaning and interests as the decision support system made the wrong assumptions about the nature of diplomatic work. The systems assumptions about practice and they way it posited relationships and actability ran counter to the community of users.

New media vary in the degree to which they project interactional expectations, such as the kind of contributions others are expected to make and the kinds of roles to play. Expectations are more minimal and ambiguous in generic systems, devices, and applications (e.g., mobile phones, email, sms, twitter) and much more explicit and evident in workplace technology, decision support systems, and in systems designed for particular communities. These expectations can be seen in what the new media presume about the seven key facts of interaction. The ways in which users resist, work around, and take up new media in their interaction is telling about what the technology presumes about how communication works and ought to work in regard to turn-taking, identity, action, expandability of sequences, repair, coordination, community norms, and emergent outcomes. The way that an ICT or Information System contends with these facts of communication matters for the technologically enabled practice that develops.

Rather than seeing technical and the social merely as two different realms, a pragmatic view sees technology as an extension human creativity in devising practices for engaging each other to do things together. In order to do things together people in dyadic, group, organization, community, or societal relations, negotiate solutions to taking turns, taking up identities with each other, preferable actions, acceptable expansion of interactional sequences, repairing breakdown, coordinating actions, preferable norms for interacting, and contending with emerging outcomes of interaction. In this sense, people in co-operation with machines design communication through the choices made about managing their interactivity. It is the consequences of this communication design that inspires the idea of a pragmatic web.

The pragmatic web (Aakhus 2006; Schoop, de Moor & Dietz 2006; Singh 2002) is a way of conceptualizing new media as context dependent relations among people, ICTs, and information systems. A pragmatic web stands in contrast to a pervasive, conventionalized view of new media as systems of transmission for context independent knowledge. Instead, new media co-evolve and become part of a community’s ontology as it is tied into and made part of a communities discourse. The new media can become part of the way of talking. In this sense, new media become part of the background knowledge and ways of reasoning particular to communities. The intervention of new media can expand or contract the direction and content of a community’s discourse as it affords the management of disagreement among community members (de Moor & Aakhus 2013).

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