Communication Spaces

Abstract

Concepts of space are fundamental to our understanding of human action and interaction. The common sense concept of uniform, metric, physical space is inadequate for design. It fails to capture features of social norms and practices that can be critical to the success of a technology. The concept of 'place' addresses these limitations by taking account of the different ways a space may be understood and used. This paper argues for the importance of a third concept: communication space. Motivated by Heidegger's discussion of 'being-with' this concept addresses differences in interpersonal 'closeness' or mutual-involvement that are a constitutive feature of human interaction. We apply the concepts of space, place and communication space to the analysis of a corpus of interactions from an online community, 'Walford', which has a rich communicative ecology. A novel measure of sequential integration of conversational turns is proposed as an index of mutal-involvement. We demonstrate systematic differences in mutual-involvement that cannot be accounted for in terms of space or place and conclude that a concept of communication space is needed to address the organisation of human encounters in this community.

Collective Contexts in Conversation: Grounding by Proxy

“…This analysis requires an index of context dependence between turns. Following Healey, White, Eshghi, Reeves, and Light (), we use the distribution of ellipses and anaphora for this purpose. This is a more general case of the clarification example used in the introduction.…”

“A Brave New (Digital) World”? Effects of in-House Social Media on HRM

“…However, Healey et al (2007) also show that even within one sole technical environment ("communication space"), locality and distance must be differentiated. It is not only the technology but also the relevance of the topic (induced by social norms or by individual curiosity) and the relation between people that constitutes "nearness."…”

“…CMC is generally embedded in a technical environment that restricts or enables certain forms of interaction (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994;Orlikowski, 2000). Social media, in particular, constitute a frame of interaction that connects organization members constantly; the phenomenon of being virtually present (Healey, White, Eshghi, Reeves, & Light, 2007) or virtual praises via "digital gestures" such as Facebook's well known "like"-button (Hauptmann, 2012) are just two examples of this. Technical possibilities such as these create a kind of 'working together' or even a 'being together' in organizations.…”

Measuring transactional distance in web-based learning environments: an initial instrument development

“…In accordance with Moore's original definition, we emphasise the aspect of '(mis)understanding', while at the same time including the aspect of 'closeness' as a dimension of transactional distance that is consistent with the concept of 'psychological or communication space' (Fiedler, 1952;Healey, White, Eshghi, Reeves, & Light, 2008). Perceived closeness concerns the social aspect of transactional distance, while shared understanding and perceived learning concern the cognitive aspect.…”