Communication Characteristics of Instant Messaging Effects and Predictions of Interpersonal.pdfVIP

Communication Characteristics of Instant Messaging: Effects and Predictions of Interpersonal Relationships Daniel Avrahami and Scott E. Hudson Human-Computer Interaction Institute Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA { nx6, scott.hudson }@ ABSTRACT and the rate at which messages are exchanged), independent of Instant Messaging is a popular medium for both social and work- message content. related communication. In this paper we report an investigation of In this paper, we report the collection and analysis of a corpus the effect of interpersonal relationship on underlying basic containing over 90,000 real instant messages exchanged between communication characteristics (such as messaging rate and 16 participants and over 400 of their buddies. Our findings show, duration) using a large corpus of instant messages. Our results for example, that users tend to communicate longer with their show that communication characteristics differ significantly for social buddies than with work buddies, but do so at a significantly communications between users who are in a work relationship slower pace. We then report on the use of our findings to inform and between users who are in a social relationship. We used our the creation of two statistical models that predict the relationship findings to inform the