Hi.
Today, I'm going to talk about how
people configure their audiences when they communicate.
And to start with an illustrative example,
suppose you've called a meeting.
And what's probably intuitive to you
and well-established in the literature
is that your decisions about what to say as we
kick off the discussion.
So what intentions you choose to convey,
what words you use and so forth are all shaped
by who's in the room.
So to speak, they're designed to suit this audience.
But if you think about it, you made many other communicative
choices beyond what to say.
And in fact, as a person who called the meeting,
you've decided who to let into the room.
You might have also decided how to structure
this group of participants by assigning them roles
like spokespeople or facilitators,
or if I just arranging the chairs.
Halfway through, you might pull someone aside
and have a side conversation.
And all of these choices configure the audience.
Now, this isn't just a matter of moving around
chairs in the room.
If you've decided in the year 2020 to have a meeting online,
you could send out invitations, privately message
select participants, and so forth.
So in our paper, we formulate a general description
of audience configuration choices,
and we build on the aspects that I just
illustrated with this example of calling a meeting.
And so what we argue is that when we analyze communication
behaviors, focusing on audience configurations
has been informative and important complement
to other analysis on for instance how people design
the content of their messages.
Because you know, it might be tempting to pass off
configuration choices as merely the metadata.
But when you set up a meeting with someone,
but also install their boss or advisor or department
chair in the back of the room, that
says something even as a department chair never
says a word.
Now, these choices are especially relevant in settings
where people have a lot of leverage
in specifying their audience, and we take email
as a demonstrative case study.
Every time you start a new email thread,
you make configuration choices along several dimensions.
You decide who to send the email to,
how the addresses are organized among the To and Cc fields.
And when you reply, you could remove people
or add new participants.
And what's illustrative and emailing
is that these choices are quite granular,
and they're explicit to everyone involved.
So think it's a blatant faux pas,
and it'll advised, reply all.
And if we only focus on the content of the email message,
we'd have a crucially incomplete view of emailing.
So we put these ideas into practice
in a data set of emails sent between employees
of a now defunct tech company, and we
examine how audience configurations
as instantiated in these emails sending choices
are tied to other aspects of the communication.
And just to pick one of these aspects,
understanding which emails are more likely to get
replied to could be helpful for email users.
And past work actually on this corpus
has found that this relates to the number of addresses
in this U-shaped curve.
So out of all emails with four addresses for instance,
around 47% get at least one reply.
But that analysis doesn't quite distinguish how these four
addresses are arranged.
And as we've established, an email sender
can actually make more granular choices here.
So let's contrast two prominent cases,
either everyone is in two or exactly one person
is singled out with the rest in Cc.
And what we see is that the trend if there's simply
more and more people and two is actually
quite different from the trend if one person is singled out
from an increasingly larger group of recipients in Cc.
And this distinction could be informative for email users,
interface designers, and communication scholars.
Now having revealed this [INAUDIBLE]
by taking this finer grained view,
we can maybe dig further into where it comes from.
Perhaps, it reflects different purposes
for emailing better attach to different configurations.
Or perhaps, the responsibility for responding
by fuses across recipients if you don't single anyone out.
We can also look more closely at which of these addresses
tend to do most sort of applying,
and our paper examines some of these intricacies more closely.
And of course, audience configuration choices
intersect with many other parts of the communication,
so the types of people involved, what was said, and so forth.
And our paper examines some of these aspects too.
And we think that explicitly highlighting
this aspect of communicating is generative of a rich set
of questions, including and beyond the ones that we've
explored, such as the motivations
of the people involved.
Or how these configuration choices
intersect with other types of communicative decisions
like the choice of message a medium.
In this enriched view, we'll continue
to have practical relevance across channels like email
or group chat or online meetings, which
further enable choices like how to configure an audience.
Now, I encourage you to check out
our paper, which offers a lot more framing
for these types of questions.
And I'm also happy to chat with the audience.
Thanks.