On the Potential of some Pragmatic Concepts for the Web

Within the IS-field the notion of a speech act has been used as a point of departure by many scholars in the analysis of computer-mediated communication. This pragmatic concept has turned out to be very useful in the development of the field. However, the notion of speech acts is too restricted for continued exploration of the full potential of the pragmatic web. In this paper we examine some pragmatic concepts that we believe have potential in relation to three core activities of the IS-field; 1) description and understanding, 2) evaluation, and 3) design. The concepts that we will examine are “social activity”, “communicative act”, “sequences of communicative acts” or “exchange types”, “communicative feedback” and “turn management”. We describe the concepts and then exemplify how they can be used to analyze web services by examining e-mail and Wikipedia as two activities currently on the web. Our analysis leads to a partly new description of both IS-artifacts. It also leads to a number of open questions concerning the functionalities of both IS-artifacts.