The eyes of the beholder: Understanding the turn-taking system in quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication

This article is a comparison of the turn-taking systems in computer-mediate d communication (CMC) and oral conversation. Previous research on CMC has r elied on printouts of conversations as data, whereas we used videotaped rec ordings of each participant's computer screen in order to capture the inter actional process of producing the conversation. We used a transcription sys tem developed specifically for this type of analysis that enabled us to col late the actions and experiences of each participant onto one document. Bec ause of this, we were able to see what information each participant had at the time they made the decision to write, post, edit, or erase a message. T his article is based on 4 quasi-synchronous CMC (QS-CMC) conversations betw een students in a college classroom. We discovered that the rum-taking syst em of QS-CMC is substantially different from the rum-taking system of oral conversation (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), and we describe some of the implications of this difference for the structure of interaction in QS -CMC.