Conveying Availability and Capability to Communicate in Naturalistic Interaction

This paper investigates the basis for social awareness; analysing naturalistic data to understand how people convey availability and capability to communicate in everyday interaction and how they use existing presence systems. The findings show that people in close personal relationships provide intermittent information about their activities and plans which are used to infer and negotiate future contact and communication decisions. The implications for more sophisticated cross-media communication systems are discussed.