Interaction and outeraction

Abstract

We discuss findings from an ethnographic study of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace and its implications for media theory. We describe how instant messaging supports a variety of informal communication tasks. We document the affordances of IM that support flexible, expressive communication. We describe some unexpected uses of IM that highlight aspects of communication which are not part of current media theorizing. They pertain to communicative processes people use to connect with each other and to manage communication, rather than to information exchange. We call these processes "outeraction." We discuss how outeractional aspects of communication affect media choice and patterns of media use. INTRODUCTIONRecent empirical work has shown the importance of informal workplace communication for effective collaboration. By informal we mean interactions that are generally impromptu, brief, context-rich and dyadic [16,34,35,36]. These interactions support joint problem solving, coordination, social bonding, and social learningall of which are essential for complex collaboration [16,17,19,20,23,24,34,35]. This research demonstrates that face to face interaction is the primary means of informal communication in the workplace, though email is also gaining ground [18]. In this paper, we document the utility of a technology which is relatively new to the workplaceinstant messaging-for effectively supporting informal communication.In the first part of the paper, we describe the informal communication tasks that IM supports: quick questions and clarifications, coordination and scheduling, organizing impromptu social meetings, and keeping in touch with friends and family. These tasks usually involve rapid exchange of information or affect. We also document how the affordances of IM, in particular its immediacy, make it successful in supporting these tasks.But IM does more than support quickfire informal communication. It facilitates some of the processes that make informal communication possible. In the second part of the paper, we explore unexpected uses of IM for what we call outeraction. Outeraction is a set of communicative processes outside of information exchange, in which people reach out to others in patently social ways to enable information exchange.Current media theories describe processes by which people ground the content and process of communication [4,5], initiate interaction [28], or choose an appropriate medium for the task at hand [7,29]. These theories make a number of assumptions about the nature of communication: (a) that communication is primarily about information exchange; (b) that communication is best studied one interaction at time, rather than in a temporal sequence spanning multiple discrete interactions;(c) that participants are unproblematically available for communication; and (d) that a single medium is used throughout a communication event.We document uses of IM that challenge these assumptions. First, we describe a distinct stage of communication prior to information exchange in which IM...

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