Communicative Action

Each of you is expected to produce a single term paper, (minimum: 2500 words; maximum: no limit), in which you individually analyze a segment of chat from a chat system of your own choosing. Using the analytical methodology described in our text (Hutchby, 2001) and in our readings. That doesn’t mean you should neglect the readings or outside sources to enrich your paper. In this course, we are concerned with communication as it happens in real life, not as a theoretical assemblage of concepts and theories. Therefore, the capstone project for this course is a research paper that gives you the opportunity to examine a bit of actual, real, online text messaging between real people. You can use a log of any actual chat that you or someone you know engages in.

This can come from your computer or your smart phone. It should consist of a log of text messages between real people. You can uses logs of chat rooms, AIM, I Message, any SMS log, Facebook chat, etc. The data can be something you collect yourself or you can use some chat logs provided for you on the Course Content page of Blackboard for this course. The idea here is to take the basic notions of co-presence, affordance, and the procedural organization of interaction and discover them in the actual communicative action people perform in online environments. Therefore, this is not your typical library research paper. Rather than report on what other people might have to say about social interaction.

Further Description

I am interested in seeing if you can use the material you’ve learned in this course to do your own. Real research using the methods of analysis described in your book. The focus is on understanding how people in your chat actually use the resources available to them to communicate, address and repair troubles that may emerge. In additionally generally make some kind of sense of each other in your particular chat data. Though you are not doing a library research paper, you still need to cite all your sources, even if they are readings from the course, and provide a bibliography in the APA format. For more information on APA style,

consulthttp://flash1r.apa.org/apastyle/basics/Failure to cite your sources. Also  give references is a violation of academic integrity. Also it can result in (1) a failing grade. (2) a VAIR being filed with the Department of Communication and finally the Dean.

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