Computer Conferencing Systems

Social and psychological effects in Computer-mediated communication

Although communication via computers is not a new subject, the recent exponential increase of such an activity has reached the point that for many people electronically distributed communication supplants the postal service, telephone, and even the fax machine. Accompanying computerized communication is an expected convergence between electronic communication and media that is to lead us to the long promised mingling of radio, television, and computer. As all these technological innovations are drastically changing our world, there is a necessitating challenge to comprehend their social, psychological, and cultural impacts.

To this purpose, in the present article we intend to review some of the social implications of computerized communication. We start by discussing some important events in the history of computer conferencing systems and we give a short presentation of the main communication services on the world-wide computer network of the Internet. Subsequently, focusing on computer-mediated communication we review the main social and psychological implications resulting from the fact that the computer medium deprives communicants of social, physical, and contextual cues. In addition, computerized communication creates a social information processing environment, where a variety of relational and socioemotional interpersonal interactions may flourish. Next we examine the behavioral role of naming via pseudonyms or hiding personal information by anonymity and the creation and recreation of identities in the computer-mediated social space. Finally, we discuss some topics related to gender differences in computerized communications.

Computer Conferencing Systems

The fusion of computers and telecommunications over the past decades is based on the creation of a huge world-wide web of computer networks, through which data are efficiently transfered and people communicate with other people in novel ways. Human communication through computer networks was predicted in 1968 by J.C.R. Licklider and R. Taylor, research directors for the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), who believed that "in a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face-to-face" (Licklider & Taylor, 1968).

When computing is used as a communication device, one of the surprising properties is that it becomes a social activity. People like to meet other people, to discuss with them, to exchange opinions and information, to confer in a computer network. Murray Turoff is considered by many (Rheingold, 1993) as the father of computerized conferencing. While employed for war games and other kinds of computer simulations at the Institute for Defense Analysis in the late 1960s, Turoff was trying to computerize the "Delphi method." Delphi was a process developed at RAND in which printed questionnaries and responses were circulating among a group of experts.

In 1971, Turoff moved to the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness, where, during the Nixon administration's wage and price freeze, he was involved in a project to construct a system for rapidly collecting and collating information from geographically dispersed branch offices. EMISARI (Emergency Management Information and Reference System) was the result, a system considered, along with parts of Engelbart's NLS (oNLineSystem), as the original ancestor of today's computer conferencing systems (Rapaport, 1991, and Rheingold, 1993).

Later Turoff moved to the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where the National Science Foundation (NFS) funded him to research the uses, effects, and design of computer conferencing software. Thus, Turoff developed the EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), which went online in 1975, an electronic communication laboratory for use by geographically dispersed research communities (Rheingold, 1993).

Another conferencing system developed in the 1970s was designed by a Californian think tank called Institute for the Future (IFTF), where PLANET (PLAnning NETwork) was developed (Rheingold, 1993). PLANET was designed for use by planners in government and industry, and later it evolved into Notepad, a private global conferencing system still used by a number of large industries such as Shell Oil.

Conferencing systems continued to evolve over the next decade with the development of Control Data Corporation's PLATO, the British educational system Caucus, an EIES expansion called Participation and the WELL's conferencing software Picospan (Rapaport, 1991, and Rheingold, 1993).

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