Forums | ENG302 Interpersonal Communication in the Workplace

21 April 2025, 1:44 PM

Dear All:

Slides used for the lead-in to presentations this morning can now be found as <LNG302 Topic 10-Supplementary.pptx> at Connect as well as LMO.

The 1966 paper by early chat bot developer Joseph Weizenbaum (Weizenbaum, 1966), which I mentioned, is already available from the page of Topic 10. It is highly recommended not so much because of it brevity, but because of the author's foresight years ahead of the current fanfare. A more detailed statement of Weizenbaum's theorisation of computing in relation to what it means to be human appears in the following print monograph--

Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer Power and Human Reason: From judgement to calculation. San Francisco: Freeman.

With my prefatory comments about the tendency of organisations to move their help chat facilities onto mobile application platforms in mind, I still hope to be able to engage us all on the experience of simulating the service encounter. A good way to prepare for this is to look through the websites of organisations listed on the page for Topic 10, including examples of simulated communication from previous years. You can think ahead to felicity conditions, institutional roles, discursive roles, transactional goals, relational goals, all on top of the management of relations on this rather special social stage.

See you all on Thursday.

Paul