Page 150 -

4.2 Social mechanisms in communication and collaboration 1 19 1

I
Verbal and non-verbal communication
When people are working closely together they talk to each other, issuing com-
mands and letting others know how they are progressing with their part. For exam-
ple, when two or more people are collaborating together, as in moving a piano,
they shout to each other commands like "Down a bit, left a bit, now straight for-
ward" to coordinate their actions with each other. As in a conversation, nods,
shakes, winks, glances, and hand-raising are also used in combination with such co-
ordination "talk" to emphasize and sometimes replace it.
In formal settings, like meetings, explicit structures such as agendas, memos,
and minutes are employed to coordinate the activity. Meetings are chaired, with
secretaries taking minutes to record what is said and plans of actions agreed
upon. Such minutes are subsequently distributed to members to remind them of
what was agreed in the meeting and for those responsible to act upon what was
agreed.
For time-critical and routinized collaborative activities, especially where it is
difficult to hear others because of the physical conditions, gestures are fre-
quently used (radio-controlled communication systems may also be used). Vari-
ous kinds of hand signals have evolved, with their own set of standardized syntax
and semantics. For example, the arm and baton movements of a conductor coor-
dinate the different players in an orchestra, while the arm and baton movements
of a ground marshal at an airport signal to a pilot how to bring the plane into its
allocated gate.

uch communication is non-verbal? Watch a soap opera on the TV and turn down the
and look at the kinds and frequency of gestures that are used. Are you able to un-
derstand what is going on? How do radio soaps compensate for not being able to use non-
verbal gestures? How do people compensate when chatting online?

Comment Soaps are good to watch for observing non-verbal behavior as they tend to be overcharged,
with actors exaggerating their gestures and facial expressions to convey their emotions. It is
often easy to work out what kind of scene is happening from their posture, body move-
ment, gestures, and facial expressions. In contrast, actors on the radio use their voice a lot
more, relying on intonation and surrounding sound effects to help convey emotions. When
chatting online, people use emoticons and other specially evolved verbal codes.

Schedules, rules, and conventions

A common practice in organizations is to use various kinds of schedules to orga-
nize the people who are part of it. For example, consider how a university manages
to coordinate the people within it with its available resources. A core task is allo-
cating the thousands of lectures and seminars that need to be run each week with
the substantially smaller number of rooms available. A schedule has to be devised