Accomplishing the pop-up in Instant Messaging: a specific form of invitation
Résumé
Despite the increasing number of softwares that provide computer mediated conversations, studies concerned with the ways in which participants accomplish their activity through a technological device (like an Instant Messaging service, or IM) are relatively neglected. IM is recognized as an artefact that enables multimodal dyadic interactions in real time. IM offers also different “presence awareness” features indicating whether participants on one's list of contacts are currently online. Actors can then create new interactional spaces by exploiting the “buddy list” or some pop up. In this paper we examine how IM participants accomplish the interactional capabilities of the technological artefacts to open an IM interaction. Based on a detailed video analysis of ordinary exchanges, we explore the ways in which actors especially orient to pop up “X has just signed in”. As soon as a contact is online, the program makes this feature visible and suggests an invitation to open an interaction. By selecting this pop up the users create a new “page of conversation”. We'll see then how users integrate those technical tools in the sequential organization of actions. Paying attention to the temporal accomplishment of the pop ups reveals the specific configuration of the relationship between the design architecture and the interaction structure, and consequently the situated participative function of the artefact in this context. The local contingencies tied to the technological device are grasped as relevant resources for the interactional progression: exploited as a constitutive unit, the pop up “X has just signed in” is embedded in the sequential organization of activities, and internationally achieved. Finally, we discuss how interactions configured through a technological artefact can reveal local methods positioning the technology as interactional.