Exploring Norm Violations and Norm Management in Collocated Synchronous Communication: Dual-channel Communication as Hybrid Space with Spillover and Asymmetries

Digital tools for collocated synchronous communication, like backchannels and question management systems, are increasingly used in events and education to support interaction between performer(s) and audience. Discussions in the communication tool are prone to various unexpected interruptions which violate against the communication tools’ original purpose, i.e. violating performers’ expected norms. We study such norm violations and related performers’ coping approaches in two 15-week-long field experiments in two elementary schools. Our results demonstrate how the collocated synchronous tools form dual-channel communication environment where both physical and digital channel are in use at the same time. We show how norm violations ‘spill over’ from their onset in one channel to continue in the other. However, we observed performers coping approaches were primarily focused in the physical channel. This resulted in an asymmetry of presence and delayed the performers’ ability to act on violations. Our findings show that the channels in dual-channel communication are tightly interwoven and must be considered as an integrated communication space instead of two co-occurring but separate channels. We provide a framework to study norm violations and discuss implications of this framework on the design of these systems.