Computer-Mediated Communication on the Internet

One of the most widespread innovations in information technology is the use of computer networks to communicate with other people. Such services are known in the academic literature as computer-mediated communication (CMC), a term going back in the literature of networks at least to Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff's classical study The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computers (Hiltz & Turoff, 1993, first published in 1978). In fact, John S. Quarterman, in his definitive work on computer networks and conferencing systems (Quarterman, 1990), categorizes network services as either (i) computer-mediated communication or (ii) resource sharing (which involves sharing storage space, processing, software, data, and peripheral devices).

Computer-mediated communication is the process of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communicative discource using a computer-based communication channel, taking place predominantly in a text-based environment. The commonest world-wide computer network used in CMC is the Internet. Other networks for CMC include Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), the UUCP mail network, the USENET newsgroups (today most of them carried in the Internet) as well as a number of specialized tele-conferencing or video-conferencing systems in use in universities, industry and government designed to support discussions, group decision-making and cooperative projects.

In the Internet, the most commonly used CMC service is electronic mail or e-mail (Carl-Mitchell & Quarterman, 1993) sent and received by individuals. Usually, electronic mail is delivered to either a mailbox or a list of mailboxes. The latter is the case when e-mail is addressed to an alias, i.e. a mailing list that expands (redirects) to many mailboxes or even to other aliases (other lists). Thus, mailing lists provide ongoing forums for discussion of relatively specific topics and there are thousands of such lists on the Internet (SRI, 1992). A huge collection of public access (not distributed to individual users' mailboxes) mailing lists is composing the USENET newsgroups or USENET News or Network News (Carl-Mitchell & Quarterman, 1993). In essence, USENET news is a distributed bulletin board system set up on many hosts, so that users of each served host may access newsgroups easily, without loading their own mailboxes.

All the above Internet services (e-mail, mailing lists, and USENET news) operate on an asynchronous mode, i.e. on a store-and-forward principle, in which messages are sent via batch delivery mechanisms. However, there is another mode of delivery in the Internet, operating on a synchronous, real-time mode of communication. Such is the Unix "talk" program, allowing a user on one computer system to open a split screen session with a user on another computer system, in such a way that each person (maximum of two) can see (read and reply-write) what the other types. Talk being the most basic example of real-time interaction, there are more synchronous services on the Internet (Wiggins, 1995).

One of the them is the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a mode of interaction on the Internet in which people are able to communicate synchronously on different "channels" from disparate locations, in a manner similar to CB radio (Citizen's Band radio); people are able to send messages to all others who have logged into the same "channel" at the same time (each "channel" being in principle devoted to a particular topic of conversation).

Another interactive Internet service is the MUDs systems. MUDs are networked, multiparticipant, user-extensible systems, in which users are able to perform mostly textual real-time interaction. So, a MUD can be viewed as a very low tech (textual) virtual reality environment and it has roots in various text-oriented adventure games. In these games, a user-player entering a room is presented with a textual description of the room and its contents, and a list of exits. Furthermore, players could communicate with one another, could cooperate or fight against each other, and could create new objects, or descriptions of objects, that others could interact with. In this way, MUD differs from the IRC in allowing users to construct and manipulate a wide variety of objects. The exact meaning of the acronym MUD is not universally agreed upon; originally it stood for Multi-User Dungeon, but some prefer the more generic Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Domain. A recently developed variety of MUDs are the Multi-user Object Oriented enveronments or MOOs (Curtis & Nichols, 1993), which might be used in distance education applications too.

A recently developed category of real-time Internet services are running under the Multicast Backbone (MBONE) project, aiming to experiment with multicast audio and slowscan video transmissions across the Internet. One of the most prominent MBONE services is the Internet Talk Radio (ITR) transmitting radio programs into the Internet. Transmitted ITR data are stored and can be available asynchronously (through ftp, gopher or World-Wide Web).

Computer Effects

A big part of the work on the psychological and sociological impacts of CMC assumes that the computer itself in a text-based medium are the sole influence on communicative outcomes. Since this approach assumes the elimination of physical and social cues, sometimes it is called the "cues filtered out" approach (Culnan & Markus, 1987; Walther & Burgoon, 1992). Because computer-mediated interactants in a text-based medium cannot see, hear, and feel each other, the absence of regulating feedback (such as gestures, nods, and tone of voice) may cause coordination problems and deprive interactants of salient social cues. In the absence of the social context cues and of the non-verbal behavior, the computer-mediated communicative discourse is left in a social vacuum quite different from face-to-face interaction; this is often quite important in bargaining situations (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984). Thus, cues-filtered-out theories characterize CMC as less personal, lacking "social presence," and enabling very little socioemotional and relational communication. Social presence theory states that the fewer channels or codes available within a medium, the less attention will be paid by users to the presence of other social participants (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976).

The presumed lack of physical and social contextual cues results several further implications (Baron, 1984; Cheseboro & Bonsall, 1989; Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984). Interactants gain greater social anonymity, because their gender, race, rank, physical appearance, and other features of public identity and indicators of vertical hierarchy, status, and power are not immediately evident (as they cannot be transmitted via computerized text). Gone are the status and position cues, a situation that may have a potentially positive effect on group behavior. As Kiesler et al. (1984) note, "software for electronic communication is blind with respect to the vertical hierarchy in social relationships and organizations." Consequently, participation appears to proceed more evenly distributed across group members. Some researchers see a "democratizing" effect and equate this balancing of participation with egalitarianism (Walther, 1992). Some others go further to claim that computer mediation makes it difficult for people to dominate and impose their views on others, thus, favoring women and minorities (Baron, 1984).

On the other hand, the established egalitarianism through computer mediation in a communicative discourse may create some problems too. In fact, under these conditions, sometimes it takes longer to reach a decision, complete a task, or arrive at a consensus (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Furthermore, the anonymity and lack of socioemotional information is taken to erase established conventions and norms for interaction (Kiesler et al., 1984; Rice, 1984, 1989; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). Because people cannot see or hear others laugh, wince, or indicate any other psychoemotional reactions to their performances, they become more socially insensible and sometimes quite rude by using abusive language and by being apt to what in the jargon of the CMC communities is called "flaming" (Baron, 1984; Kiesler et al., 1984).

However, there are several case studies of CMCs showing the development of numerous personal relationships and socioemotional behavior in CMC. Although some people often exchange angry postings, there are some people falling in love online (Reid, 1991; We, 1993). As Rice & Love (1987) state, "CMC systems can support socio-emotional communication and the communication reflects the inherent communication traits of users." This observation contrasts with the cues-filtered-out approach and it supports Walther</a>'s (1992) social information processing perspective, asserting the adaptation in CMC of existing communication cues of relational management.

The social information processing perspective is also supported by research (Sherbloom, 1988) suggesting that CMC users adapt computer-generated textual signals for specific purposes. Thus, computer-mediated communicators are developing an electronic "paralanguage" (Walther, 1992) to express affective and socioemotional information. As Jaffe et al. (1995) point out, these informal codes, which they call "emotext," may include intentional spelling, lexical surrogates, grammatical markers, strategic capitalization, and visual arrangements of text characters into "emoticons." Intentional misspelling often includes the repetition of a vowel or consonant to represent the accentuation of a word or phrase (for example, "sssooooo good!"). Lexical surrogates function as parenthetical metalinguistic cues (as "hmmm" might represent a paraverbal expression of thoughtfulness). Grammatical markers include repeated exclamation points and question marks to add affective emphasis. Strategic capitalization is interpreted as a call for attention, a warning, or sometimes an expression of anger. "Emoticons" or "smileys" refer to short combinations of textual characters (often punctuation marks) serving for facial expressions or vocal intonations (as :-) for "smile"). In addition, the formed vocabulary in a CMC textual environment tends to include an extensive catalogue of acronyms (as INMHO for "in my humble opinion" and BTW for "by the way").

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