Co-text Loss in Textual Chat Tools

The research presented in this article investigates a problem related to the lack of understanding of messages exchanged during chat sessions. There is confusion in the majority of the textual chat tools when various people converse at the same time. Sometimes a participant does not identify the relationship of a new message with a previous one, and is unable to establish a conversation thread—within this research this phenomenon is denominated “co-text loss.” The causes, consequences and frequency of this phenomenon are discussed in this article. Two textual chat tools that have been developed to try to reduce the occurrence of co-text loss are presented in this article, together with the results obtained through the use of these tools during synchronous debates among undergraduate and postgraduate students in distance learning courses.