Conversational Practices and Presence: How the Communication Structure Exploits the Affordances of the Medium

Communication practices are strictly interdependent on the resources afforded by the medium, and on the combination of functionalities offered. In this contribution we frame this great variation of resources in terms of presence affordances, since they anchor the communication practices to the specificities of a certain environment. A corpus of mediated conversations recorded in different settings and collected within the PASION project will be examined to this purpose. It will be shown how the structure of the actions sequence, starting from turns and actions constituting it, varies across environments and how nature of the medium is reflected in these variations. On the one hand, this shows that similarities and differences across communication environments can be captured by using the presence concept. On the other hand, this shows how communication practices encapsulate presence cues, and offers a concrete example of they way in which they can be qualitatively investigated.