Are you aware of research giving evidence of approximate time and/or conditions under which participants in a (recorded or not) spontaneous conversation start loosening their self-monitoring? In other words, I assume that even when participants start a conversation with a high degree of control and self-check of their linguistic and non verbal behaviour, this high self-monitoring tends to loosen over time. Any ideas of specific studies on this?
Many thanks!
Since long researchers have talked about the 'observer paradox', which is pretty much an obstacle that it difficult to overcome. I quite like Richard Watts' (1999) uptake - he suggests simply not to bother but admit this as a natural concomitant of working with real-life data collected in such a way.
Sorry, I guess this doesn't really respond your query... In my own recordings I simply do not bother, but this is of course just my 2 cents on this.
Self-monitoring, as Mark Dingamase said, never stops. However, awareness of being recorded does fade, so monitoring for being recorded can stop, at least temporarily. I remember, when I was in grad school, a group of us, inspired by Tannen, decided to record our Thanksgiving dinner conversation. By the second hour we had forgotten about being taped and were saying scurrilous things about our department chair, which reminded us that we were taping, so we erased it. Later, in my own research, I gave a group of speakers a topic to discuss while being recorded, and after about 15 minutes they were no longer discussing the topic, but rather joking and gossiping quite naturally. After a few minutes of this, they remembered that they had a task, and went back to it, with more formal speech, which again changed to more casual, then they would remember the task and go back to it. The whole recording went this way - they would forget about the task and about being taped, and then remember, and then forget, and then remember again. So it's not that there is a point where the fact of being taped is lost and after that it's gone. Rather, the awareness comes and goes throughout.
Thanks for your thought-provoking answers... I'd say that with "self-monitoring" I include all attempts at self-checking one's own performance in communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Self-monitoring include self-repair, but I'd not say is limited to it. In the context of video-mediated interactions, as Fay Wouk says, it is a matter related to consciousness about being mediated by a machine and to some extent it seems to differ from what happens in f2f contexts. In one of my studies (2011), I found out that users, when interacting over Skype, tend to look at the box with their own image and to some extent check how they "appear" onscreen. If they are aware they're being recorded, attempts at checking what they say and what they do onscreen appear to increase. However, as Mark Dingemanse argues, it very much depends on how you interpret the concept of "self-monitoring" and the extent you consider, if any, you can gauge self-monitoring, be it verbal and non-verbal.
As Kadar stated , when the participants know they are observed and recorded, their behavior is not the exact representation of the construct under study. regarding monitoring and self-checking, people do not show their normal reactions; some become over-users of monitoring while others become under-users.
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