24. Responses and non-responses in workplace emails

Disruptive online communication: How asymmetric trolling-like response strategies steer conversation off the track

“…We chose action pairs as our main object of interest for two reasons: (1) there already is a vast body of CA research on them (e.g., Schegloff 2007), which has demonstrated their fruitfulness in analyzing how people manage actions and activities jointly, and (2) conversation analytic studies of online environments, especially studies that look at maintaining coherence, have shown that people generally are strongly oriented toward paired actions in interaction (e.g., Meredith 2019;Skovholt and Svennevig 2013). Although text-only online communication has been described as only loosely coherent when compared to face-to-face conversation (Herring 1999) and also the adjacency of a pair's two member actions on some platforms is disrupted (Giles et al, 2015;Gruber 1998;Herring 1999;Markman 2005), people still typically consider a post to have a main action that should be addressed in an expected manner (Stommel and Koole, 2010).…”

“…Herring 2010; Rintel and Pittam, 1997;Woodruff and Aoki, 2004). CMC and EM-oriented studies have examined what makes online social interaction distinctfor instance, by pinpointing certain features that separate text-only online conversation from spoken interaction: turn-taking (e.g., Cech and Condon, 2004;Garcia and Jacobs, 1999), sequence organization, repair (Markman 2010), the norms related to responding (Skovholt and Svennevig, 2013), CMC's conversational maxims (Crystal 2001;Lindholm 2013), openings and lack of embodied conduct (e.g., Meredith 2019), etc. Scholars doing such work appreciate the fact that software-related factors may shape these and other aspects of the interaction, including the problems faced (e.g., misinterpretation of silences; see Garcia and Jacobs, 1999) problems that may be exploited in trolling.…”

The Blurring Boundaries Between Synchronicity and Asynchronicity

“…They examined the time of day that the messages were sent as well as the delay in responses and found that the chronemic cues are an important source for interactants to assess their communication partners. Skovholt and Svennevig (2013) examined the meaning assigned to chronemic cues in e-mail exchanges and found that participants drew on various contextual cues when interpreting a delayed response or a nonresponse, and in the majority of the cases they construed the problem source as systemic rather than interpersonal. The importance of this realization lies in the fact that it highlights the complexity of chronemics in the computer-mediated environment: In text-based CMC, chronemic cues can be attributed to either the participants or to the environment.…”

Leadership Communication in a Virtual Team

“…This makes it possible for leaders to appear powerful, even on a distance. Interestingly, with respect of the amounts of messages, the reminders and extent of feedback [29,30], the Agenda leader appears as a powerful leader, displaying her hierarchical position in the group. Simultaneously, her methods of creating in group solidarity and performing requests, shows that her institutional role is back grounded as she enacts egalitarian leadership building socioemotional ties within the team.…”