Computer-Mediated Communication in Convergent Media
Susan Herring, IUB School of Library & Information Science
Anupam Das, IUB Linguistics
Courtney Honeycutt, IUB School of Library & Information Science
Asta Zelenkauskaite, IUB Telecommunications
2:00-3:30 pm on Friday, November 9, 2007
Indiana University Bloomington, Herman B. Wells Library, Room LI 001
Refreshments will be available prior to the talk at 1:45 pm.
Students are invited to stay following the talk for informal discussion.
ABSTRACT
Convergence is the interaction of multiple media, especially, the interaction between traditional media and new media. Text-based computer-mediated communication is increasingly taking place in convergent media formats in which it is secondary, by design, to other entertainment-related activities. Examples are text chat in multiplayer online role-playing games, comments on videos on YouTube, and messages left on “scrapbooks” or “walls” in social network sites. Despite the fact that these are noisy and cumbersome communication environments, a significant minority of users employs them to converse interpersonally, devising ad hoc strategies for achieving minimal levels of conversational coherence, and in the process creating new kinds of users and uses not foreseen by the systems’ designers.
This panel discusses some of the challenges and discoveries associated with analyzing conversations in convergent media, bringing together research on three sites: Orkut, a social network site; Twitter, a microblogging service; and an iTV (interactive television) SMS (text messaging on mobile phones) program in Italy. Visualizations of conversations in each will be presented that reveal users’ problems with establishing and maintaining coherence, and implications will be discussed for convergent media system design.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
Susan Herring is a professor of Information Science and adjunct professor of Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include computer-mediated communication, discourse analysis, gender and language, and culture and language. She currently edits the interdisciplinary Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. For more information on Dr. Herring’s research and other interests, see http://www.slis.indiana.edu/faculty/herring/.
Anupam Das is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Linguistics with a minor in Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests include social network analysis, computer-mediated communication, interactional sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis.
Courtenay Honeycutt is a second-year Ph.D. student in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests include CMC, the multilingual Internet, online communities, and computer-mediated discourse analysis. She has a Master’s degree in Communication.
Asta Zelenkauskaite is a first-year Ph.D. student at the department of Telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington. Her major research interests are computer-mediated communication, media convergence, and interactivity. Asta has a Master’s degree in Linguistics and approaches these phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective.
