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IM waiting: timing and responsiveness in semi-synchronous communication

Published:08 November 2008Publication History

ABSTRACT

Responsiveness, or the time until a person responds to communication, can affect the dynamics of a conversation as well as participants' perceptions of one another. In this paper, we present a careful examination of responsiveness to instant messaging communication, showing, for example, that work-fragmentation significantly correlates with faster responsiveness. We show also that the presentation of the incoming communication significantly affects responsiveness (even more so than indicators that the communication was ongoing), suggesting the potential for dynamically influencing responsiveness. This work contributes to a better understanding of computer-mediated communication and to the design of new tools for computer-mediated communication.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
          November 2008
          752 pages
          ISBN:9781605580074
          DOI:10.1145/1460563

          Copyright © 2008 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 8 November 2008

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