Computer-Mediated Communication PDF

6 Chapter 1 What Is Computer-Mediated Communication? protocols (VOIP) to place a call from your computer to someone else’s telephone, is that CMC because you used your computer, or merely voice communication like a telephone call? Even more complex are questions about...

6 Chapter 1 What Is Computer-Mediated Communication? protocols (VOIP) to place a call from your computer to someone else’s telephone, is that CMC because you used your computer, or merely voice communication like a telephone call? Even more complex are questions about mediation, as computers offer greater bandwidth for communication—that is, they allow us to communicate through more cues than just our verbal message. In the era of Zoom and Google Hangouts, is a videoconference closer to CMC or FtF communication? It quickly becomes apparent that as communication media and devices continue their steady, relentless march forward these technological advances will increasingly raise funda- mental questions about CMC as a subdiscipline within communication. The good news for us is that all of this upheaval and questioning means CMC is an exciting, volatile, and engaging area in which to research and learn. Good for us! We’ll get back to defining CMC in a bit, but first let’s take a look at what CMC can and can’t do effectively by looking at how it is situated within the communication discipline more broadly. Situating CMC within the Communication Discipline CMC can be considered as a subdiscipline situated within the broader field of com- munication. Like interpersonal communication, group communication, organizational communication, and other areas within communication science, CMC focuses on a spe- cific subset of questions, variables, and theories of human communication. But unique among the communication subdisciplines, CMC readily spans other subdisciplines and fosters new ways to ask new questions about the fundamental nature of human inter- action. In addition to augmenting what is going on in other parts of the field, CMC is increasingly distinguishing itself as its own area and with its own unique sets of con- cerns that we, as CMC scholars, are best prepared to address. One way to begin to understand what CMC is is to consider our place within the communication discipline as a whole, and the distinct role of CMC both as a means of augmenting other subdisci- plines and as a subdiscipline in its own right. CMC as Convergence Certainly, there are elements of all of communication’s subdisciplines in others. For example, when studying two friends talking—an interpersonal interaction—the ­cultures of the two friends play a role in the communicative exchange, even if the intercultural element of the interaction is not the focus of the examination. How- ever, CMC offers a particularly unique opportunity to converge with other parts of the communication discipline and to help understand, isolate, and probe facets of human interaction. Foundational CMC research in the early 1990s actually started with studies of nonverbal and verbal communication (Walther, 2011). As people started becoming more comfortable using computers for messages, text-based tools like email and chats presented an opportunity for researchers to study how to isolate, manipulate, and explore specific parts of a communicative exchange that wouldn’t be possible even over the telephone. How do we study whether someone’s message is persuasive regardless of how they look, act, or sound when delivering it? We simply send it via an email message, which innately strips out all the extra information and cues about the message sender, leaving only the message itself. Early CMC research often took this approach, using mediated channels to isolate particular variables of interest to manipulate just them and to understand their subsequent effects. More recently, as computers and their various means of mediating interactions have pervaded our personal and professional lives, we see the theories, processes,  Situating CMC within the Communication Discipline 7 and effects of computer mediation integrated into other interactions and types of communication, transcending subdisciplines. As job applicants turn to services like LinkedIn and GlassDoor to learn about organizations to which they are consider- ing applying, CMC becomes integrated into organizational communication and its processes of assimilation and information seeking. When dating partners meet and initially communicate via dating sites like Match or Tindr, moving their communica- tion offline after they feel comfortable meeting face-to-face, CMC is integrated into interpersonal communication and its exploration of relational formation and roman- tic relationships. As social media like Facebook and Twitter allow us to keep in touch not just with close friends but also with those whom we met in study abroad pro- grams, CMC allows us to transcend geography and culture, offering new opportu- nities for understanding intercultural communication. Questions about the function of an online forum for fans of a particular sports team, or about the differences in fandom processes and effects between fans in a Discord server for Red Wing fans and fans together in person at a Red Wing hockey game, are both CMC questions, yet they are also innately questions of intergroup and intragroup communication. Thus CMC can be and often is used as a lens to understand other parts of the field, particularly as their communicative processes are maintained or changed by the nature of being online. As we’ll see in later chapters, CMC can help explain and unpack phenomena within relationships, organizations, groups, public relations, education, and politics. In this way, CMC is a great bridge within our field, serv- ing a distinct role of spanning and connecting several often different subdisciplines and fostering understanding, collaboration, and deeper exploration. If you attend an academic conference on communication and sit on a panel focused on CMC, you will likely hear discussion that connects several areas within the communication field, bound together by the nature of the mediated processes that facilitate the com- munication. In this way, CMC has helped converge previously separate subdisci- plines, allowing multiple contexts and relationships to collapse online (Marwick & Boyd, 2011) and giving us an opportunity to more holistically study and understand the fundamental processes of human communication. CMC as Divergence And yet CMC is also unique, sometimes divergent from other subdisciplines. Computer-­mediated communication is much more than just taking questions from other parts of the discipline and putting them online to ask anew. Indeed, approach- ing CMC as simply moving offline processes online is rarely a fruitful or interesting way to advance our knowledge. There is little reason to think that if you insult me online, that threat is relationally different than the same offline. Particularly as more communication occurs online and both channels (e.g., email, Facebook, Snapchat) and devices (e.g., tablets, smartphones, smartwatches) become more ubiquitous and integrated into the social fabric of our lives, there are numerous facets of CMC that are distinct in their own right. Far beyond the nature of merely “being online,” the study of CMC diverges from other subdisciplines, setting itself apart in several ways. First, CMC has set itself apart from other parts of the communication disci- pline by exploring how humans adapt to a new means of communication and take advantage of new channels and cues. Just as media (including print, radio, and tele- vision) studies before it, CMC research explores how people adopt and adapt to new and emerging channels for communication. As people increasingly interact via computer systems, it changes the way that we interact by giving us new channels, new affordances, and new opportunities for interaction. For example, unlike when we interact offline, social network sites like Facebook and LinkedIn make our social 8 Chapter 1 What Is Computer-Mediated Communication? networks immediately visible and readily navigable (Ellison & Boyd, 2013). Thus we don’t have to remember that old classmate from elementary school we have not talked to in a while: the system displays that connection and occasionally reminds us of that connection. Likewise, if you are interested in a job at a particular com- pany but are unsure who to ask about working conditions or possible job openings, tools like LinkedIn can help you identify people you know who know someone who works for that organization (Piercy & Lee, 2019), which is good because people don’t walk around offline wearing a list of people they know. Second, CMC is unique as a subfield due to some of the communicative pos- sibilities that, while possible offline, are readily evident and usable online. Some processes appear in many places, but are much more common and natural online, making CMC an effective means to explore them. For example, masspersonal com- munication was put forward to describe (a) interpersonal communication over a mass medium, (b) mass communication via an interpersonal medium, or (c) the con- vergence and combination of the two (O’Sullivan & Carr, 2018). This definition could include a marriage proposal at a sporting event broadcast on the Jumbotron: the message is certainly interpersonal, as one person is (hopefully) asking only one other person to marry her/him, but the interpersonal interaction is publicly viewable as it is broadcast on the stadium’s television. Although these masspersonal processes can occur offline (Walther, Carr, et al., 2010), the technological affordances of many CMC tools make masspersonal communication much more common. Now, when you post “Happy birthday” to a friend’s Facebook timeline, the message is partially interpersonal, as it a message from you to them on their birthday. And yet, at the same time, the message is also a mass message in that it is public and accessible by anyone visiting your friend’s Facebook page. Even more complex is that your friend could use the same social media tool, Facebook, to send a private message back to you thanking you for your birthday thoughts. Similarly, a user can now broadcast a mass message via a YouTube video and receive interpersonal feedback tailored to the poster and video via comments below the post. Tensions such as the public-or- private, mass-or-interpersonal, or broad-or-personalized natures of messages online make CMC a unique subfield as it facilitates processes that, while possible in other media, are not common, and thus are of interest to CMC scholars as they investi- gate these processes in a much more natural setting. What Is CMC? What, then, is CMC? Though many conceptualizations for CMC exist, there has surprisingly not been a concise definition offered to help us clearly distinguish CMC from mass media or other mediated forms of communication. For the purposes of this book, computer-mediated communication is considered to be the transmission of meaning between two or more humans via digital technologies and emphasiz- ing the effects of mediation on human communication processes over specific tech- nological processes (Carr, 2020a). How we understand “computers” continues to change, as computers are no longer just bulky desktop systems and can now in- clude smartphones, wearable technologies, and Internet-based programs. However, acknowledging the role of “computers” as some form of digital intermediary helps distinguish CMC from television or radio, which transmit meaning via radio waves. Additionally, this definition helps distinguish email from a written letter. Though both may have similar effects and processes (as we will discuss throughout this text), a written letter may be mediated communication, but it does not meet our criteria for consideration as a computer-mediated communication as messages are not transmitted by digital technology.