Gilad Ravid

Turn-taking is a key characteristic of conversation, and is well studied in diverse
contexts. How do insights about chronemics in face-to-face communication transfer to the online context? The research reported here looks into turn-taking in asynchronous computer mediated communication by analyzing three diverse datasets comprising a total of more than 150,000 responses: email responses created by corporate employees in work contexts, responses created by university students participating in course discussion groups, and responses to questions posted in a public, commercial information seeking virtual forum. The response times revealed in each of the datasets yielded a power-law distribution. Moreover, most of the responses (at least 70%) were created within the average response time of the responders, and very few (at most 4%) of the responses were created after a period longer than ten times the average response time. These generalized findings persist across various users, contexts, and even across traditional as well as online communication media. Asynchronous CMC seems more synchronous than is implied by its reputation. email implies a widespread expectation of fairly rapid response. The implications of this uniformity are discussed, as well as some possible applications of the findings to the improvement of computer mediated communication and to the research of online silence.