Participatory status in electronically mediated collaborative work

Overhearing has been observed to be an important conversational resource in a number of cooperative work contexts. Participatory status describes a particular kind of overhearing where two or more primary participants are actively involved in some cooperative task with one or more peripheral participants who are not actively involved, but nevertheless have a legitimate reason for listening in. Our interest in participatory status is focussed on how the way an audio video link is configured could affect a peripheral participant. Clark’s theory of language use is successfully used to model participatory status and to make predictions about these effects.