Grounding in communication, and what a chat keeps
Clark and Brennan listed eight properties a communication medium can have. A typed conversation has two of them, which explains a great deal about how chat goes wrong.
Grounding is the work two people do to establish that they have understood each other. Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan set out eight properties a medium can have or lack, and a typed conversation has only two of them.
A text conversation is not a thinner version of talking. It is a different medium with a different set of properties, and in 1991 two researchers wrote down exactly which ones. Their list is a precise account of what a chat carries and what it never had.
Clark and Brennan’s eight constraints, and where a chat sits
In Grounding in Communication, a chapter in Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition edited by L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine and S. D. Teasley and published by APA Books in 1991, Clark and Brennan set out eight properties that a communication medium can have.
In their own terms: copresence, where both people share the same physical environment. Visibility, where they are visible to each other. Audibility, where they communicate by speaking. Cotemporality, where the receiver receives at roughly the same time as the sender produces. Simultaneity, where both can send and receive at once. Sequentiality, where the two sets of turns cannot get out of sequence. Reviewability, where one person can review the other’s messages. Revisability, where a sender can revise a message before it goes.
The chapter sets these against actual media. Face to face conversation has six of them. The telephone has four. Their table gives electronic mail exactly two: reviewability and revisability. A typed chat sits in that last group, and the six it is missing are what the rest of this page is about.
Least collaborative effort, and why texting reads as terse
The chapter’s organising principle is stated directly: by the principle of least collaborative effort, people should try to ground with as little combined effort as needed. The prediction that follows is that people will use whichever grounding techniques a medium makes cheapest, and that the same technique can cost very different amounts in different media.
Their worked example is the word okay. Face to face or on the telephone it can be timed precisely, so that it counts as evidence of understanding rather than an interruption. Over a keyboard it is difficult to time precisely, and trying to do so may interrupt the other typist, so the cost of an acknowledgment is higher. On their account the acknowledgment does not disappear, it gets rationed, because the medium has made it expensive. The page on why text messages get misunderstood covers a separate and well measured reason the same messages land differently.
A note on scope. The chapter is from 1991 and its examples are face to face talk, telephone, video and terminal teleconferencing, answering machines, electronic mail and personal letters. Phone messaging as it exists now was not among them. The eight categories are the authors’; applying them to a modern chat is a direct extension of their framework and not something they tested.
A transcript keeps two of the eight and loses six
Copresence, visibility and audibility were never in a typed conversation to begin with. Cotemporality and simultaneity were there while the exchange was happening and end the moment it stops, so no file can hold them. What an export preserves is the pair the medium always had: the messages can be reviewed, and they were composed with the chance to revise before sending.
That is a useful thing to know before reading an old conversation back. A transcript is not a recording with the sound removed. It is a complete record of one channel and no record at all of five others, and the gap is a property of the medium rather than something the export left out. What the file format itself can and cannot carry is set out in the page on which export files can be analysed.
Group chats break the constraint texting usually keeps
Sequentiality is defined in the chapter as turns that cannot get out of sequence, and the authors note that with electronic mail, answering machines and letters a message and its reply may be separated by intervening turns. A two person thread usually holds sequentiality: a reply follows the thing it replies to.
A busy group chat does not meet that definition, because intervening turns from other exchanges sit between a message and its reply, which is the same separation the authors describe for electronic mail and letters. On the eight property account that is not rudeness or inattention, it is the loss of a specific structural property that two person messaging normally retains. The page on reply speed and turn taking looks at what the timing of replies does and does not show.
The one channel a transcript does preserve
This is where a tool that reads a chat has to be honest about its reach. Portraitor’s privacy policy says only the written messages are read, and that photographs, videos and voice recordings are never opened and never transmitted. It also says that masking removes who is speaking, and does not remove what was discussed.
Set against the eight properties, that is a close fit with what a transcript actually is. The written channel is the part the medium recorded, and the analysis is confined to it. What it cannot reach was not lost by the tool: there was no audibility and no visibility in the file to begin with. The page on photos in a chat export covers what happens to the attachments that travel beside the text.
If you want to see what can be read from the one channel that does survive, Portraitor works only from the written messages in an export.
Grounding is how a shared understanding gets built. The matching question is what happens when it breaks and someone puts it right, which conversation analysts call repair; how a chat fixes its own mistakes works through the three places a typed repair can happen.
The short listener responses that carry much of that work in speech, and what becomes of them in writing, are covered in backchannel responses in chat.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What is grounding in communication?
Grounding is the process by which two people establish that what one of them said has been understood well enough for the current purpose. Clark and Brennan describe it as the moment by moment updating of common ground, which they define as mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs and mutual assumptions.
Who introduced the idea of common ground?
The 1991 chapter by Clark and Brennan is the standard reference for grounding, and for common ground itself the authors cite earlier work by Clark and Carlson in 1982, Clark and Marshall in 1981, Lewis in 1969 and Schelling in 1960.
Does the 1991 chapter cover text messaging?
No. The media it examines are face to face conversation, the telephone, video teleconference, terminal teleconference, answering machines, electronic mail and personal letters. Phone messaging is an extension of its categories rather than something the authors studied.
Which of the eight properties does a chat export keep?
Reviewability and revisability, which are the two the chapter assigns to electronic mail. The other six are either absent from typed conversation altogether or end when the exchange does.
A chat is not a quiet conversation. It is a medium with two of eight properties, and reading one back is reading the channel that survived.
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