Silence in virtual meetings: The case of virtual business professional project

Abstract

The present study provides an overall viewpoint of the symbiotic interrelation that technology and discourse maintain. Due to the development of new communication tools based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) researchers are given the opportunity to deal with new academic contexts and genres that pose new challenges for the profession (Ruiz-Madrid & Fortanet-Gómez, 2017). This is the case of Virtual Business Professional Project. The focus of this paper is on the identification of silence during the virtual meetings held by international students in the IBM Connections Platform. Although silence has been studied from multiples approaches, to our knowledge no research has focused on silence in online communication. This investigation emphases on the psycholinguistics approach applied by Zuo (2002) and the classification of silence according to Jensen (1973). The analysis is based on the observation of the recordings of virtual meetings held by students at five universities in Spain, the United States of America (Hawaii, California, Utah) and Canada. After conducting a quantitative study on the duration and location of silence in the conversations, our main results seem to indicate that the use of silence in online meetings are related to a number of variables such as context and motivation.