Navigating the complex social ecology of screen-based activity in video-mediated interaction

Ufuk Balaman and Simona Pekarek Doehler
Abstract

Task-oriented video-mediated interaction takes place within a complex digital-social ecology which presents, to participants, a practical problem of social coordination: How to navigate, in mutually accountable ways, between interacting with the remote co-participants and scrutinizing one’s own screen –which suspends interaction–, for instance when searching for information on a search engine. Using conversation analysis for the examination of screen-recorded dyadic interactions, this study identifies a range of practices participants draw on to alert co-participants to incipient suspensions of talk. By accounting for such suspensions as being task-related through verbal alerts, typically in the form let me/let’s X, participants successfully ‘buy time’, which allows them to fully concentrate on their screen activity and thereby ensure the progression of task accomplishment. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the complex ecologies of technology-mediated interactions.

Keywords:
Publication history
Table of contents

1.Introduction

Geographically dispersed participants’ video-mediated interactions (henceforth VMIs), require moment-by-moment coordination between individual participants’ ‘private’ (i.e., mutually non-accessible) orientations to screens and their ‘public’ participation to ongoing talk-in-interaction (Heath and Luff 1993Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff 1993 “Disembodied Conduct: Interactional Asymmetries in Video-Mediated Communication.” In Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, edited by Graham Button, 35–54. Routledge.Google Scholar, 2000 2000Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Jenks and Brandt 2013Jenks, Christopher Joseph, and Adam Brandt 2013 “Managing Mutual Orientation in the Absence of Physical Copresence: Multiparty Voice-Based Chat Room Interaction.” Discourse Processes 50 (4): 227–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Oittinen and Piirainen-Marsh 2015Oittinen, Tuire, and Arja Piirainen-Marsh 2015 “Openings in Technology-Mediated Business Meetings.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 47–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Such contextual requirements become particularly significant in online task-oriented settings where task accomplishment is largely dependent on the successful management of the coordination work (Balaman and Sert 2017aBalaman, Ufuk, and Olcay Sert 2017a “The Coordination of Online L2 Interaction and Orientations to Task Interface for Epistemic Progression.” Journal of Pragmatics 115 (July): 115–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Balaman 2018Balaman, Ufuk 2018 “Task-Induced Development of Hinting Behaviors in Online Task-Oriented L2 Interaction.” Language Learning, 21. 10125/44640Google Scholar, 2019Balaman, Ufuk 2019 “Sequential Organization of Hinting in Online Task-Oriented L2 Interaction.” Text & Talk 39 (4): 511–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), and where individual participants’ orientation to the multisemiotic resources (e.g. texts, images; cf. Goodwin 2013Goodwin, Charles 2013 “The Co-Operative, Transformative Organization of Human Action and Knowledge.” Journal of Pragmatics 46 (1): 8–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2018 2018Co-Operative Action. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar) for task-accomplishment made available through screens may suspend joint engagement in talk-in-interaction, and therefore possibly cause interactional trouble (Brandt 2011Brandt, Adam 2011 “The Maintenance of Mutual Understanding in Online Second Language Talk.” PhD Thesis, Newcastle University.; Brandt and Jenks 2013Brandt, Adam, and Christopher Jenks 2013 “Computer-Mediated Spoken Interaction: Aspects of Trouble in Multi-Party Chat Rooms.” Language@Internet 10: 1–21.Google Scholar; Balaman and Sert 2017b 2017b “Development of L2 Interactional Resources for Online Collaborative Task Accomplishment.” Computer Assisted Language Learning 30 (7): 601–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Sert and Balaman 2018Sert, Olcay, and Ufuk Balaman 2018 “Orientations to Negotiated Language and Task Rules in Online L2 Interaction.” ReCALL 30 (3): 355–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). In these situations, participants are faced with the practical problem of navigating, in mutually recognizable ways, between social interaction with remote co-participants and the scrutiny of their own screen, for instance when searching for information on a given search engine (Näslund 2016Näslund, Shirley 2016 “Tacit Tango: The Social Framework of Screen-Focused Silence in Institutional Telephone Calls.” Journal of Pragmatics 91 (January): 60–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). While exactly these searches are instrumental for the accomplishment of the joint task, they represent a potential source of interactional trouble, as they typically suspend talk, and hence may impede the progressivity of social interaction (Rintel 2010Rintel, E. Sean 2010 “Conversational Management of Network Trouble Perturbations in Personal Videoconferencing.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, 304–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2013Rintel, Sean 2013 “Video Calling in Long-Distance Relationships: The Opportunistic Use of Audio/Video Distortions as a Relational Resource.” The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronic de Communication (EJC/REC) 23.Google Scholar; Olbertz-Siitonen 2015Olbertz-Siitonen, Margarethe 2015 “Transmission Delay in Technology-Mediated Interaction at Work.” PsychNology Journal 13 (2–3): 203–34.Google Scholar).

As a specialized speech exchange system (Arminen, Licoppe, and Spagnolli 2016Arminen, Ilkka, Christian Licoppe, and Anna Spagnolli 2016 “Respecifying Mediated Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (4): 290–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Licoppe and Morel 2018Licoppe, Christian, and Julien Morel 2018 “Visuality, Text and Talk, and the Systematic Organization of Interaction in Periscope Live Video Streams.” Discourse Studies 20 (5): 637–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, going back to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson 1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), task-oriented VMIs involve an organization of turn-taking that differs from ordinary conversation. In particular prolonged suspension of talk may be instrumental in task accomplishment – and hence mutually agreed upon –, as it allows (individual) participants to fully concentrate on screen activity in view of retrieving task-relevant information. Such silences designed for information retrieval also typically enable the results of these retrievals to be subsequently brought into the ‘public’ space of the interaction for the purpose of joint task accomplishment. In this sense, while they may suspend talk, silences often contribute to moving the task forward, i.e., to fostering the progressivity of the overall activity. This, however, does not mean that prolonged silences are normatively treated as acceptable by participants. On the contrary, task-oriented video-mediated interaction has been found to include many instances during which suspension of either the progressivity of talk-in-interaction or task-accomplishment are treated as problematic by participants (Brandt 2011Brandt, Adam 2011 “The Maintenance of Mutual Understanding in Online Second Language Talk.” PhD Thesis, Newcastle University.; Brandt and Jenks 2013Brandt, Adam, and Christopher Jenks 2013 “Computer-Mediated Spoken Interaction: Aspects of Trouble in Multi-Party Chat Rooms.” Language@Internet 10: 1–21.Google Scholar; Balaman and Sert 2017b 2017b “Development of L2 Interactional Resources for Online Collaborative Task Accomplishment.” Computer Assisted Language Learning 30 (7): 601–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Balaman 2018Balaman, Ufuk 2018 “Task-Induced Development of Hinting Behaviors in Online Task-Oriented L2 Interaction.” Language Learning, 21. 10125/44640Google Scholar). Accordingly, one issue for the participants in task-oriented VMIs is to consistently display cessation of talk as related to task-accomplishment, rather than as due to a random non-task-related matter.

Against this backdrop, we examine how participants navigate the complex digital-social ecology (Luff et al. 2003Luff, Paul, Christian Heath, Hideaki Kuzuoka, Jon Hindmarsh, Keiichi Yamazaki, and Shinya Oyama 2003 “Fractured Ecologies: Creating Environments for Collaboration.” Human–Computer Interaction 18 (1–2): 51–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) of VMI at the interface of social interaction and individual screen-based activities. Based on screen-recording data collected from task-oriented video-mediated second language interactions that were part of a virtual exchange project between geographically dispersed partners, the current study describes how the participants to dyadic VMIs deploy verbal expressions (most often: let me X) in concert with other resources such as non-lexical vocalizations or grammatical projection to alert each-other to incipient suspensions of talk and thereby lay the ground for their own subsequent ‘private’ screen-based activities (i.e., activities that are not observable to co-participants; cf. Heath and Luff 1993Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff 1993 “Disembodied Conduct: Interactional Asymmetries in Video-Mediated Communication.” In Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, edited by Graham Button, 35–54. Routledge.Google Scholar, 2000 2000Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). We show how these resources co-operate in ways that respond to locally occasioned needs for individuals’ screen orientation and systematically precede their screen-based activities. We demonstrate how participants’ signaling of upcoming and ongoing screen-based activities is highly context-bound and context-shaping in VMI, how it pre-emptively accounts for incipient breaks in the progressivity of talk-in-interaction as being task related, and how, thereby, it creates affordances for participants to orient to the textual and more generally visual information available on their respective screens in interactionally non-disruptive and mutually recognizable ways. We discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the complex ecologies of technology-mediated interactions, and the “new agencies and accountabilities effected through reconfigured relations of human and machine” (Suchman 2007Suchman, Lucy A. 2007Human-machine Reconfigurations. Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar, 12).

2.Progressivity and video-mediated interaction

Participants to social interaction are centrally concerned with the moving forward of their interaction, that is, with its progressivity. Progressivity is at stake at all levels of organization, including the step-by-step moving forward of words, turns or sequences of actions (Schegloff 1979Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1979 “The Relevance of Repair to Syntax-for-Conversation.” In Discourse and Syntax, edited by Talmy Givon, 261–86. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2007 2007Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Interactional trouble of various sorts may impede on progressivity at any of these levels (for seminal observations see Schegloff 1979Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1979 “The Relevance of Repair to Syntax-for-Conversation.” In Discourse and Syntax, edited by Talmy Givon, 261–86. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar on repair and Goodwin and Goodwin 1986Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, and Charles Goodwin 1986 “Gesture and Coparticipation in the Activity of Searching for a Word.” Semiotica, 62(1–2): 51–76.Google Scholar on word-searches). Interactional repair provides a paramount example for the fact that the “conjoint operation of the principles of progressivity and intersubjectivity [i.e. establishing mutual understanding]” (Heritage 2007Heritage, John 2007 “Intersubjectivity and Progressivity in Person (and Place) Reference.” In Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural and Social Perspectives, edited by Nick J. Enfield and Tanya Stivers, 255:255–80. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar, 260), may result in conflict: In the case of repair, the principle of intersubjectivity may invade the principle of progressivity, as the moving forward of talk is momentarily suspended.

The importance of progressivity for participants is highlighted by the fact that participants employ various means for minimizing disruption when encountering trouble, and thereby maximizing the compatibility between the principles of intersubjectivity and of progressivity. For instance, at the level of turns at talk, they may resort to precise grammatical constructions such as syntactic pivots to minimize the disruptiveness of self-repair by warranting syntactic continuity between the repairable and the repair (Pekarek Doehler 2011Pekarek Doehler, Simona 2011 “Emergent Grammar for All Practical Purposes: The On-line Formating of Dislocated Constructions in French Conversation.” In Constructions: Emerging and Emergent, edited by Peter Auer and Stefan Pfänder, 46–88. Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Pekarek Doehler and Horlacher 2013Pekarek Doehler, Simona and Anne-Sylvie Horlacher 2013The Patching together of Pivot-patterns in Talk-in-interaction: On ‘Double Dislocations’ in French. Journal of Pragmatics 53: 92–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). At the level of sequence progressivity (e.g., Schegloff 2007 2007Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), questioners may relax or drop the preference for the next selected speaker to respond when progressivity is significantly impeded, allowing non-selected speakers to provide the response (Stivers and Robinson 2006Stivers, Tanya, and Jeffrey D. Robinson 2006 “A Preference for Progressivity in Interaction.” Language in Society 35 (3): 367–92. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

Importantly for our purpose here, progressivity at the level of talk may be interfering with or, on the contrary, fostering progressivity at the level of the overall joint activity. Specifically in contexts of multiactivity (Haddington et al. 2014Haddington, Pentti, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile eds. 2014Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking. John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), where the situation at hand requires participants for instance to engage both in interacting with each other and in retrieving information from a screen, participants may orient to the “exclusive orders” (Mondada 2014Mondada, Lorenza 2014 “The Temporal Orders of Multiactivity.” In Multiactivity in Social Interaction: Beyond Multitasking, edited by Pentti Haddington, Tiina Keisanen, Lorenza Mondada, and Maurice Nevile, 33–75. John Benjamins Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) of their multiactivity, in which one activity (e.g., talk) is typically suspended in favor of another (e.g., screen-based search). This is exactly what we see participants do in our task-based VMIs (see also Pekarek Doehler and Balaman 2021Pekarek Doehler, Simona and Ufuk Balaman 2021 “The Routinization of Grammar as a Social Action Format: A Longitudinal Study of Video-mediated Interactions”. Research on Language and Social Interaction. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

In the data under scrutiny, one potentially central source of disruption and trouble is the mutual non-accessibility (Heath and Luff 1993Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff 1993 “Disembodied Conduct: Interactional Asymmetries in Video-Mediated Communication.” In Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, edited by Graham Button, 35–54. Routledge.Google Scholar, 2000 2000Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Brandt 2011Brandt, Adam 2011 “The Maintenance of Mutual Understanding in Online Second Language Talk.” PhD Thesis, Newcastle University.; Jenks and Brandt 2013Jenks, Christopher Joseph, and Adam Brandt 2013 “Managing Mutual Orientation in the Absence of Physical Copresence: Multiparty Voice-Based Chat Room Interaction.” Discourse Processes 50 (4): 227–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Oittinen and Piirainen-Marsh 2015Oittinen, Tuire, and Arja Piirainen-Marsh 2015 “Openings in Technology-Mediated Business Meetings.” Journal of Pragmatics 85: 47–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) of participants’ individual screen activities. This entails what Heath and Luff (2000 2000Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 86; see also 1993Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff 1993 “Disembodied Conduct: Interactional Asymmetries in Video-Mediated Communication.” In Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, edited by Graham Button, 35–54. Routledge.Google Scholar) refer to as “asymmetric access to each other’s activities”, as one participant’s manipulations of the screen may not be inspectable to co-participants for what they are. Mutually non-accessible is not only the nature of these activities, but also the very fact that participants engage in such activity at a given moment in time. That is, others’ suspension of talk cannot be inspected by participants for what it is, and such local asymmetry in access may lead to interactional trouble, as illustrated in Extract 1:

Extract 1.Problematization of prolonged silences in task-oriented VMIs (Balaman 2018Balaman, Ufuk 2018 “Task-Induced Development of Hinting Behaviors in Online Task-Oriented L2 Interaction.” Language Learning, 21. 10125/44640Google Scholar)

1  ZEH:  ↑o::h (.) i found that $↓hahhhh$
2        (1.1)
3        in germany (0.5) a city in Germany
4        (1.9)
5        er:
6        (5.3)
7  DEN:  [what is it?
8  NUR:  [yeah?

Taken from the very speech exchange system that is the focus of this study, the extract shows how a participant (ZEH) in a hinting/guessing task initiates hinting by delivering a verbal clue (a city in Germany), then pauses (l. 4), and produces a hesitation marker projecting more to come, yet then remains silent (l. 6) while searching for further cues on her screen (not noted in transcript). The co-participants then explicitly problematize this silence through requests for information (what is it?) and for continuation (yeah?), possibly due to the fact that the silence has not been made recognizable to them as being task-related, i.e. being related to ZEH’s searching for hinting cues on her screen.

This is exactly the key issue we address here: individual participants’ engaging in a concurrent course of action that suspends talk-in-interaction may not be accountable to co-participants as what it is (Whalen 1995Whalen, Jack 1995 “A Technology of Order Production: Computer-Aided Dispatch in Public Safety Communications.” In Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities, edited by Paul ten Have and George Psathas, 187–230. Washington DC: University Press of America.Google Scholar; Luff et al. 2016Luff, Paul, Christian Heath, Naomi Yamashita, Hideaki Kuzuoka, and Marina Jirotka 2016 “Embedded Reference: Translocating Gestures in Video-Mediated Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (4): 342–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Hjulstad 2016Hjulstad, Johan 2016 “Practices of Organizing Built Space in Videoconference-Mediated Interactions.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (4): 325–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Oittinen 2018Oittinen, Tuire 2018 “Multimodal Accomplishment of Alignment and Affiliation in the Local Space of Distant Meetings.” Culture and Organization 24 (1): 31–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; for an overview of research on VMI see Mlynar, Gonzalez-Martinez, and Lalanne 2018Mlynář, Jakub, Esther González-Martínez, and Denis Lalanne 2018 “Situated Organization of Video-Mediated Interaction: A Review of Ethnomethodological and Conversation Analytic Studies.” Interacting with Computers 30 (2): 73–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), and therefore may create interactional trouble. Yet, specifically in task-oriented interactions where relevant information needs to be retrieved from the screen, such engagement in concurrent courses of action is a prerequisite of task accomplishment: While it halts the progressivity of talk, it affords the progressivity of the overall task-related activity. As such, it is part of the specific type of multiactivity pertaining to task-oriented VMIs.

How concurrent activities on screens can impact on social interaction has been the object of much research. In an early statement, Whalen (1995)Whalen, Jack 1995 “A Technology of Order Production: Computer-Aided Dispatch in Public Safety Communications.” In Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities, edited by Paul ten Have and George Psathas, 187–230. Washington DC: University Press of America.Google Scholar for instance observed how, during emergency calls to 911, the position of the cursor on the call-taker’s computer menu can influence the order in which she asks questions, and how this may ensue in interactional trouble as the order of the questioning may seem unmotivated or confusing to the caller exactly because of her lack of access to the call-taker’s activity on the computer screen. Likewise, concerning telephone conversations in a service encounter setting, Näslund (2016)Näslund, Shirley 2016 “Tacit Tango: The Social Framework of Screen-Focused Silence in Institutional Telephone Calls.” Journal of Pragmatics 91 (January): 60–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar shows that screen-focused silences that temporarily put the caller on hold for the call-taker to retrieve relevant information from the screen are preceded by explicit and implicit requests for silence and their granting. In other words, call-takers pre-empt the problematization of suspensions of talk by the caller by seeking agreement for the incipient suspension and displaying that suspension as related to the caller’s reason-for-the-call. In this sense, silences due to screen orientations are ‘contextually conditioned’ (Bilmes 1994Bilmes, Jack 1994 “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning.” Semiotica 98 (1–2): 73–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) and mutually treated as unproblematic.

Especially in video-mediated interactions, further trouble may arise due to distortedness of gaze behaviors that stems from participants’ asymmetrical access to the interactional space (Heath and Luff 1993Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff 1993 “Disembodied Conduct: Interactional Asymmetries in Video-Mediated Communication.” In Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, edited by Graham Button, 35–54. Routledge.Google Scholar, 2000 2000Technology in Action. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Similarly, technological troubles such as transmission delays might impede on progressivity (Olbertz-Siitonen 2015Olbertz-Siitonen, Margarethe 2015 “Transmission Delay in Technology-Mediated Interaction at Work.” PsychNology Journal 13 (2–3): 203–34.Google Scholar), although such troubles have also been found to operate as affordances for the maintenance of the interaction (Rintel 2010Rintel, E. Sean 2010 “Conversational Management of Network Trouble Perturbations in Personal Videoconferencing.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction, 304–11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 2013Rintel, Sean 2013 “Video Calling in Long-Distance Relationships: The Opportunistic Use of Audio/Video Distortions as a Relational Resource.” The Electronic Journal of Communication/La Revue Electronic de Communication (EJC/REC) 23.Google Scholar). Therefore, the overall lack of co-presence in VMI settings occasions the emergence of both context-specific affordances and constraints (Arminen, Licoppe, and Spagnolli 2016Arminen, Ilkka, Christian Licoppe, and Anna Spagnolli 2016 “Respecifying Mediated Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 49 (4): 290–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar). Participants’ physical movements (e.g., a mouse click) and orientations to textual and visual objects on the screen (Näslund 2016Näslund, Shirley 2016 “Tacit Tango: The Social Framework of Screen-Focused Silence in Institutional Telephone Calls.” Journal of Pragmatics 91 (January): 60–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar), as well as ongoing talk, concur as intertwined modalities in VMI (Gardner and Levy 2010Gardner, Rod, and Mike Levy 2010 “The Coordination of Talk and Action in the Collaborative Construction of a Multimodal Text.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (8): 2189–2203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Balaman and Sert 2017aBalaman, Ufuk, and Olcay Sert 2017a “The Coordination of Online L2 Interaction and Orientations to Task Interface for Epistemic Progression.” Journal of Pragmatics 115 (July): 115–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Knight, Dooly, and Barbera 2018Knight, Janine, Melinda Dooly, and Elena Barberà 2018 “Multimodal Meaning Making: Navigational Acts in Online Speaking Tasks.” System 78: 65–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Balaman 2019Balaman, Ufuk 2019 “Sequential Organization of Hinting in Online Task-Oriented L2 Interaction.” Text & Talk 39 (4): 511–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) as a highly specialized speech exchange system. Thus, the coordination of multiple activities becomes consequential for the maintenance of the overall joint activity’s progressivity (Arminen, Koskela, and Palukka 2014Arminen, Ilkka, Inka Koskela, and Hannele Palukka 2014 “Multimodal Production of Second Pair Parts in Air Traffic Control Training.” Journal of Pragmatics 65: 46–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar; Due 2015Due, Brian L. 2015 “The Social Construction of a Glasshole: Google Glass and Multiactivity in Social Interaction.” PsychNology Journal 13 (2): 149–178.Google Scholar; Näslund 2016Näslund, Shirley 2016 “Tacit Tango: The Social Framework of Screen-Focused Silence in Institutional Telephone Calls.” Journal of Pragmatics 91 (January): 60–79. DOI logoGoogle Scholar).

In this paper we document how participants designedly bypass potential interactional trouble due to breaks in talk by displaying these breaks as being due to screen-based activities, and hence as being instrumental in moving forward towards joint task-accomplishment. They do so by drawing on recurrent constellations of interactional resources, namely verbal alerts (in the form of let me X, and more rarely let’s X), non-lexical vocalizations such as hmm, and the projection potential of grammatical turn-trajectories. They use these resources in situated ways so as to alert co-participants to the incipient (and sometimes ongoing) nature of suspensions of talk, prospectively accounting for these as being task-related, and thus pre-emptively displaying cessations of talk-in-interaction as being in the service of the overall progressivity of the joint task-based activity.

3.Data and procedure

The data for this study come from screen-recorded task-enhanced VMIs among 4 dyads over a period of three weeks (14 hours). The participants use Skype for educational purposes (also known as Virtual Exchange and online intercultural exchange; see O’Dowd and Lewis 2016O’Dowd, Robert, and Tim Lewis 2016Online Intercultural Exchange: Policy, Pedagogy, Practice. Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar) as part of a telecollaborative partnership between two universities (one in Turkey and one in Denmark) designed to provide opportunities for intercultural exchange. As such, the data are an integral part of an educational program and represent a type of educational setup that is currently expanding around the world. Each dyad met once a week to complete two online tasks designed in ways that respect the nature of distant settings (i.e., by encouraging screen-based activities), provide opportunities for intercultural awareness (e.g., by addressing issues of food, culture, music, cinema of the respective countries), and facilitate continuous meaning negotiation. Participants received instructions via e-mail, including a written explanation for the task procedure and an instruction video. During each virtual exchange meeting, each dyad went through the instruction e-mails, started the recordings using the online screen-recording software, met on Skype, and completed the tasks based on the instructions. The screen-recording software operated in the background on each participants’ computer separately; it successfully captured talk, screen-based activities, and computer sounds, and automatically uploaded the videos to a remote server at the end of each session.

We examined the dataset using conversation analysis and identified that the participants deploy a diverse set of practices to alert each other to their incipient screen-based activities. These include verbal alerts that make explicit the incipient orientation to the screen (e.g. let me check, let me see, let’s find), the use of non-lexical vocalizations such as uhhmmm, as well as grammatical projection (i.e., the suspension of grammatical turn-trajectories at points of maximal grammatical control, cf. Schegloff 1996 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, edited by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar, 93–94). In this study we focus on the interactions of one dyad (SIN and PAT) for reasons of data quality and completeness (106 min.) and in order to better show the mutual recognizability of the focal phenomenon in and through one dyad’s context-bound interactional history.

Our collection comprises 27 instances in which either one of the participants alerts the other to her incipient screen-based activity, in all cases resorting to a verbal alert in the form of let me X, or let’s X (schematized as let (me) X in what follows), which is then followed by other resources (see above). Here, we present four extracts that represent the recurrent features of these alerts. The first three extracts are taken from one task in particular, namely a movie-guessing task. Both participants were given a task-instruction document including a list of 10 movies. Each participant had to pick a movie title from this pre-established list and provide hints for the co-participant so that the co-participant could guess the name of the movie (see Figure 2 below). Once a guessing round was over, the roles switched: The former guesser became the hint-provider, and so forth. Figures 1 and 2 (below) illustrate captures of the dyad’s screens (note that Courier New text, such as ‘Skype frame’ in Figure 1, represents our own labeling of what appears on the screenshots) during task engagement and show how participants’ (limited) visual access to each other was provided through a small Skype frame (see above for the distortedness of gaze). The fourth extract is taken from another task from the same dyad in which the participants are expected to move around a street view map to collaboratively create a list of top restaurants for a one-day food trip. As for the asymmetries documented in what follows, we should note that Extracts 2 and 4 show SIN deploying screen-based activities that are not accessible to her co-participants, while 3 and 5 display PAT doing so.

Figure 1.A screenshot of PAT’s screen during task engagement
Figure 1.
Figure 2.A screenshot of SIN’s screen during task engagement
Figure 2.