Impact of mediating technologies on talk and emotion: Questioning “commonsense”

Much CSCW research predominantly focuses on investigating how distributed, mediated interactions are different from collocated interactions, but rarely looks at how the use of technologies affect collocated people. We argue that the needs for studying the impact of mediating technologies among collocated people are current and large. A situation of seeing the other but not being able to see what captures his/her attention is endemic. In this paper, we investigate collocated triads as they play a collaborative, problem-solving game on laptops, on tablets or on a shared paper. People's positive emotion rose more when they talked about the complex relationships of the puzzle specifics and added new perspectives to other people's contributions during the game. People in computer conditions talked less about the specifics on the game board than people in the paper condition, but only people in the laptop condition experienced a significant decrease in positive emotion.