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Notes on Chapters 2,3,4
Chapter 2: Media Ecology
Perspective
• Defines CMC as the study of the way in which mediated
environments support and extend human communication
• Uses the term social computing to refer to the tools that
make this process possible
• Media ecology focuses for the most part on fixed
characteristics of media, an approach which not
everyone appreciates
– People appropriate technologies for their own purposes including
those not intended by their designers
– It is the social technologies which develop around the technical
tools and platforms which are the important foci of study
Chapter 2: Interactivity, digital
natives
• Author states interactivity a key characteristic of
difference between mass and digital media
– Definition of interactivity
– Is this generalization true?
• Mediated contexts appear to be replacing f2f as
environments for interpersonal comm
– Digital natives vs. digital immigrants
• Do DNs regard this as an important or meaningful
distinction?
Chapter 2: advantages,
disadvantages, definitions
• Principles of media ecology perspective
• All technological change a deal with the devil
(for each advantage, you have to pay the price
with some disadvantage)
– E.g. Being reachable all the time (an advantage) with
being reachable all the time (a disadvantage)
• HCI is considered to be part of CMC (part of the
message system)
• Human communication is never one-way
– Equates mass media with one-directional flow
– Do you agree?
Chapter 2: biases of technologies
• All comm technologies have distinctive biases,
including
• Space/time (does technology allow for communication across
different times/places)
– Conditions of attendance affect the kinds of messages
exchanged
– Is it true that online communicators generally interact while
being physically removed from each other?
» People text /IM each other in church, in meetings where
they are physically co-present but they don’t “have the
floor”, or when they are too lazy to go to the next
room/office to talk to somebody, or want to have privacy
that the circumstances (presence of others) don’t allow
Chapter 2: relationship
development
– How does the absence of physical
interlocutors affect the communicators’
feelings of privacy?
– Why CMC is conducive to relationship
development
• Choose when to disclose demographic information
• Choose when to enter and leave interaction
• Project a favorable image through careful
information control
• Hide physical defects, shyness
– And conducive to bad behavior as well
Chapter 2: types of biases
• Sensory bias (the author’s examples of a global network
aren’t very good, but you can think of certain media as being
biased in favor of vision, hearing, touching, and other
senses)
• Directional bias (one-to-one, one to many, many to many)
• Political bias (e.g. separating people from their actions,
greater anonymity, freedom to cross national boundaries) (to
a degree; there really is no privacy)
• Content bias (e.g. commercial TV in US biased toward
entertainment rather than state control)
– Not a great example; more to the point is thinking about what
kind of material does not seem to work on what media, if in fact
there are media that can’t be appropriated for just about any
purpose assuming you have “authorship”
Chapter 2: social media
• Technologies become media environments
when used to support social practices
• Social media
– Some earlier ideas about socialization of media; vary
depending on degree of input and control by the
message recipient, extent of interactivity (e.g.,
demonstrable modification of message content based
on feedback)
• Beniger-pseudocommunity (e.g. direct marketing, tailored
health messages)
• Parasocial interaction (Rubin and Rubin)-the communication
is imaginary
Chapter 2: one step or two?
– In Internet age old idea of two-step flow of
communication (with an opinion leader
filtering media content) replaced by the “onestep flow” (Bennett and Mannheim)
– Individual information/entertainment seeking skills and
habits are supplanting the role formerly occupied by the
“peer group”
– Today, however, individuals are increasingly selective
and in charge of their media environment, e.g.
customization of their news feeds
– They are also embedded in more loosely organized,
dynamic social networks that influence media
consumption habits and interpretation
Chapter 2: avatars are people too
• Other varieties of “interactivity” with persons (or
their semblances) not physically present and
perhaps not “real”
–
–
–
–
Agents
Bots
Characters
Avatars
• Communication with friends, family members,
colleagues, and strangers not physically present
but “real”
Chapter 2: social capital
• Social media-software that lets people interact with one
another, build social capital
• What is social capital? Two different meanings in the
literature
–
–
–
–
–
Property of communities
Property of persons
Weak and strong ties
Bridging and bonding social capital
Examples of social media: MMOs, Wikis, SNS, IM, etc., Flickr,
Facebook, YouTube, etc.
– Author gives poor definition of social capital as “an informal
social norm that promotes cooperation between two or more
individuals” this is just totally wrong. Gets it right later in the
chapter
Chapter 2: social media and
opportunities
• Social media provide opportunities to
make desired changes in social practices,
respond to felt needs for new affordances
– E.g. (WSJ article on use of recommendations
from Linked In becoming more commonplace
in employment, possibly supplanting the
“three letters”
– Example of development of open source
software, people subverting the existing ways
of doing to achieve a common goal
Chapter 2; affordances of networked
communities (Mynatt et al.)
• Affordance (Bradner) “the relationship between the properties of an
object and the social characteristics of a group that enable particular
kinds of interaction among members of that group". What does a
technology “afford”? (this a little different from notion of fixed comm
technology characteristics which sometimes focus on limitations)
– Persistence- provide a context for activity and a backdrop against
which to observe and evaluate change
– Periodicity – a known set of rhythms and patterns which help in
interpretation of events (e.g. typical length of time to wait for a reply;
when new posts are likely to occur, etc.)
– Boundaries (e.g. “rooms,” “groups,” spatial metaphors-boundaries
determine who can “see” and “hear”
– Engagement – different ways in which people can come together,
number of participants, ways to engage (chat, mail, etc), formality of
participation, opportunistic participation possible, etc.
– Authoring- ability to design and develop one’s space, set boundaries,
limitations, make connections through flexibility in user control over their
information and how it is accessed/used
Chapter 2: topics of social media
analysis
• Social media analysis
• Research on presence (telepresence,
immersions and physical, social and selfpresence), and in particular co-presence in
“CVEs”
(collaborative virtual environments)
– Example from mutual touch research
• Research on trust in virtual environments
• Software solutions especially in e-commerce
– TrustE, digital certificates, ratings of sellers on e-Bay
• Interpersonal trust
– Social networks friend confirmations an attempt to address this
issue
Chapter 2: topics of social media
analysis, cont’d
• The interplay between the physical and the virtual worlds
(e.g. using the web to organize parties, meetups, cell
phone GPS to locate nearby buddies for spontaneous
meetings)
• Political mobilization
• Social support, especially in the area of health, and
social networks
• Peer-to-peer networks, file sharing: Is this interpersonal
communication?
• Blogs and their challenge to authority, “legitimate”
sources; subscribers, linkages to other bloggers to form
communities
Chapter 3: Machines as Mediators
• Polkosky starts off the chapter by talking about her
experience with booking and taking a flight, noting that
the whole event up until the time she was offered a drink
by the flight attendant was mediated and involved no
human contact
– No human contact may now be the default mode for many kinds
of activities, such as ordering books, registering your car with the
DMV or renewing your license, moving money between bank
accounts, etc.
• One obvious impact of the internet has been to remove the human
intermediary from many kinds of transactions and to vest their
expertise in the technology
– Transactions must depart from the norm to bring the human back
into the loop (e.g. they have to tell you to remove some metal
object from your person at security scanner)—there has to be a
problem or special circumstance
Chapter 3: CMC in journals
• Author reports that only 6 percent of articles in
major journals in comm and social psychology
are about cmc and related topics
• But, ;ooking at Human Communication
Research, typically each issue of 5 or 6 articles
will contain 1 or 2 papers on some aspect of
CMC
• Specialized journals have plenty of articles on
the topic:
– Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
– Computers in Human Behavior
– New Media & Society
Chapter 3: inadequacy of theory
• The most widely employed theories of interpersonal
communication developed before the advent of iPhones,
IM, GPS, etc
• Are not adequate to account for the variety of means of
communication nor the variety of guises, human or
otherwise, in which interlocutors present themselves
• Are particularly not useful to help designers of advanced
communications devices and technologies understand
and anticipate how/if they will be used
• There needs to be a relationship of “turbulence”, to quote
our provost, between basic science and applications, so
that the requirements of the applications drive the
questions of the former, and the discoveries of the
science enable the realization of the implementations
Chapter 3: lean media?
• Author equates the terms computer-mediated communication and
telecommunication (?)
• Suggests that CMC may “disrupt” or “obscure” nonverbal or
extralinguistic communication and that this has been the focus of
research to date
• She may be correct with respect to the early research (mostly
laboratory-based) which operated from an assumption of deficiency
(lean media, cues filtered out, etc.-media richness model- Daft and
Lengel-what leads people in orgs to select particular media for
communicating particular types of messages)
• It is also true there is a significant body of literature (see readings on
the “dark side” dedicated to exploring the negative ramifications of
CMC)
• But there is also the tradition at looking at the liberating and
relationship-promoting effects of CMC (see Walther’s work on the
“hyperpersonal” model)
Chapter 3: other MCs
• Some related kinds of communication
technology to CMC
• Augmentative and alternative communication
(AAC): assistive technologies (text-to-speech
web browsers, tactile interfaces, TTS aids for
voice output for people who cannot speak) as
well as older assistive technologies such as sign
language)
• Spoken user interfaces such as automated call
centers where speech recognition may be one
method used to understand the user’s needs
and speech synthesis will be used to respond
Chapter 3: machine translation
• Real-time machine translation
– (e.g. Narayanan and colleagues)-issues of co-presence,
machine understanding of speech acts and conversational
macrostructures
– conversation is regarded as a cooperative enterprise in which we
are trying to reach a common goal with our interlocutor and we
expect utterances to be relevant to what has gone before. Thus
we assume that an utterance is cooperative and that for example
a seemingly irrelevant answer to our question is in fact related,
and we have to solve the puzzle of how. Principle of
conversational implicature (Grice)
• E.g. Person A: Could you help me look for my glasses?
• Person B: I have to leave for work in ten minutes.
– B doesn’t give a yes or no answer and does not address her
capability to help. so what does B mean to imply? How about
this one? It takes a little more work, may be ambiguous
• Person A. Could you help me look for my glasses?
• Person B: I can’t find mine either
– Presents big problems for machines
Chapter 3: AAC, SUI
• Research on these technologies have common concerns including
usability, impact on relationship dimensions (formation and
maintenance, information, face (to a lesser extent-impression
formation) as well as technical features such as latency,
compression, etc.
• “At least one human partner is needed in a communicative system”
True? Can’t my agent interact with your agent?
– Ideally my agent would be autonomous (wouldn’t need me to supervise
it), would be sociable, and would be able to learn from experience and
especially its errors what I like and where to find it, and what the agents
of others are like
• One drawback to AAC and SUI systems and ways in which they
differ from CMC may be the limitations the systems impose on
vocabulary, and in some cases the need to extensively calibrate or
train the system on individual users, as opposed to a mass
application
Chapter 3: dimensions of
interpersonal comm
• Author makes the claim that most theories
of interpersonal comm are focused rather
exclusively on relationship building and
maintenance. I think this is a “straw man”
• They also focus on relational decay, as
well as other dimensions of interpersonal
such as instrumental (task, information
sharing) and face (impression formation,
self-presentation).
Chapter 3: personhood
• Does an interlocutor have to be human to have
“personhood?
• Attribution of human characteristics to
computers, robots is well known
• Ex. People make different types of attributions
about the personalities of male and female
robots, such as robotic dogs, and the robots’
vocabularies can be adjusted to increase this
effect (gender-linked language)
Chapter 3: personhood, cont’d
• Humanness can be communicated (or made believable)
through a rather minimal set of behaviors
– It has been known for a long time in person perception research
that you can generate an extensive “personality profile” from just
one or two central traits, such as “warm/cold” and
“intelligent/unintelligent”
– You can also achieve the same effect with extremely brief
fragments of speech, leading people to make attributions about
the SES of speakers in which they have confidence.
– Traits are readily inferred from behavior
– In CMC context, what do we infer about a person who has a very
long signature? who starts all email correspondence with “Dear
Peggy (or person’s name)?
• If the interlocutor evokes attributions of humanlike
characteristics, does it matter if it’s human or not?
Chapter 3: limiting assumptions
• In addition to the limiting effect of requiring interpersonal
communication theories and models to assume that
everybody’s human, requiring the assumption that
interpersonal communication is distinct from other types
may also be limiting
• E.g. if we require that both parties have to have
knowledge of each other as individuals, or that they must
be interdependent
• In what ways is, for example, a spoken user interface
like interpersonal as we conventionally understand it,
and it what way is it like mass communication?
Chapter 3: limiting assumptions,
cont’d
• Are conceptualizations like one-way vs. two-way
communication, or small vs. large size of
audience for a message still useful?
• Author makes the claim that “any communication
with another entity is interpersonal” do you
agree? If we don’t require that we have
knowledge of the other, or if the goal of the
interaction is not relationship
building/maintenance, or if the influence doesn’t
have to be two-way, then almost any interaction
is interpersonal and theory needs to be modified
accordingly
Chapter 3: new competencies
• Author offers as an alternative conceptualization of interpersonal
communication the defining notion of “coordinating communication
roles of interlocutors” two interactants in coordinating listening and
speaking roles
• Does this work? Does watching TV fit this definition? How about
talking to your dog?
• Mediated communication may require some new competencies
–
–
–
–
Increasing your tolerance for ambiguity
Increase your patience for giving and receiving feedback
Learning to make the most of limited situational and contextual cues
Learning a whole new set of accommodative and compensatory
behaviors by which to regulate interpersonal distance and closeness
– Learning/following scripts that guide mediated encounters but that
depart from f2f scripts (e.g. truncated opening and closing sequences)
– What else?
Chapter 3: perception of SUI
systems
•
Four factors of perception of SUI systems
– User goal orientation
• The system would help me be productive
– Speech characteristics
• The system sounded natural
– Customer service behavior
• The system seemed polite
– Verbosity
• The system gave me more details than I needed (violated a Gricean quantity maxim)
•
•
•
Interesting that two of the four factors accounting for evaluating the quality
of non-human interactions relate to the fidelity of conversational rulefollowing, e.g. that the interlocutor has to be polite and that conversational
rules need to be followed
It is not sufficient that a f2f interaction has to be simulated; it has to be an
idealized rule-following f2f interaction
Theory of mediated interpersonal communication has to account for the
desire for the mediation to cure basic defects in human nature, such as
impatience, rudeness, and love of the sound of one’s own voice
Chapter 3: a model
• Author presents a model of sorts (next slide) in
which the effects of the individual difference and
role occupancy characteristics of the
interlocutors (human or otherwise) on cognitive
and behavioral (and affective and behavioral
intent?) on outcomes of interaction are
mediated by dialogue variables (what the
interlocutors say and how they say it) and
moderated by communication mode (f2f,
telephone, etc)
• Do we know the difference between a mediator
and a moderator?
Chapter 3: a model, cont’d
seems as if the way in which individual differences manifest
themselves as well as the mediators are likely to be heavily
determined by the moderator communication mode (e.g.
vocal range, ability of the interlocutor to directly and
discreetly control volume, etc.) so I am not sure these
elements in the model are as independent as the graphic
depiction would have them—individual differences may
dictate choice of communication mode
Chapter 4
• Newer technologies like blogging blur the distinction
between mass and interpersonal communication
• Email is an application that makes one to one, group and
mass communication possible all within the same client
• More useful to leave behind the study of the effects of
any one technology and to instead study variables that
cut across several technologies
• This is necessary because technologies are
appropriated by users and the uses change over time,
providing additional affordances
• What communication technologies do you think have
changed the most since you first started using them?
Chapter 4: f2f as gold standard
• Focusing on f2f as the ideal form of
interpersonal communication has the effect of
causing all variables that might be of interest into
a single measure of “how much this CMC
application approximates f2f” and causes us to
overlook other ways in which CMC makes for
more efficacious communication
– Do you agree? Do you think most people who study
CMC focus on users’ perceptions of how much it
approximates f2f as a global indicator, or do they
focus on new functionalities and specific motivations
for use?
Chapter 4: Like TV, CMC has its own features
that are not about being just like real life
• Author makes very good point in noting that TV scholars
don’t usually study whether a TV broadcast of a sports
event is as good as “being there”
• What features of TV or TV related technologies are
better than being there? E.g. why would it be better to
watch the Olympics on TV than to be at the games?
• TV is treated as its own symbol system with its own set
of effects
– Thus researchers are freed up to study all variables which might
have effects, not just those which enhance the being there
aspect
• With respect to web, frees you up to study aspects of the
medium which have no real-world counterparts available
to the average Joe such as the ability to fly over people’s
houses and check out their property and simultaneously
find out how much it and all the neighboring houses are
worth, or the ability to repeat and pass along a lengthy
conversation word for word
Chapter 4: ways to be better than
f2f
• Technologies can sometimes provide better
outcomes even if in some ways they are inferior
to f2f
– E.g. do limitations of web based conferencing via
Skype or Webex justify the increased travel costs for
f2f meetings among distributed participants?
– It’s appropriate in any research design to consider
what users’ or potential users’ motivations might be
for using the technology
– (see table next slide)
Chapter 4: measuring motivations
for using CMC, affordances
Online communities are useful for …
Information acquisition
Information exchange
Relationship development
Relationship maintenance
Social and emotional support
Entertainment
System function: Affordances of Engagement; Authoring
Online communities offer multiple ways for people to participate
Online communities allow people to engage in whatever ways they feel most
comfortable.
Online communities provide a pleasant environment for social interactions.
Online communities allow people to construct their online profiles.
Online communities provide opportunities for people to generate content they want
to share.
Online communities allow you to write your opinions about the things that others say
Chapter 4: is it synchronicity,
searchability, or what?
• If f2f is not the primary criterion, what are the best
indicators of efficacy of CMC?
• Author compares email and IM, says primary difference
is asynchronous vs. synchronous. Do you agree? Is
real time interactivity the key difference?
• Blogs vs. chatrooms. Is interactivity a major difference,
or is it the archiving, RSS possibilities, searchability and
public posting? Navigability?
• The question has to be efficacy for what? Doesn’t
efficacy have to be tied to your motivation for using a
communication technology?
Chapter 4: agency
• Agency: “the degree to which the self feels that he/she is a relevant
actor in the CMC situation”
• Can you have a high degree of agency as a broadcast TV viewer under
this definition? What about when you watch TV episodes on network
web sites or download them from itunes? Or watch them from your
DVR? Is this “customization”? How about the Facebook “fat bride” ads?
• Appeal of customization and tailoring is in satisfaction of ego needs and
ego referral (construal of self as important and at the center)
• Further expands definition: “the extent of manipulability afforded by the
interface to assert one’s influence over the nature and course of the
interaction”
• By this criterion, it would seem that of the affordances we have discussed
“authoring” is a critical variable in what makes one CMC technology
“better”
– Again, better for what?
• Is there a word besides agency for the same degree of individualism as a
recipient? That is, if we have expanded our definition of interpersonal to
the idea of coordinated roles, then part of the role is to be the audience
or target. So in targeted advertising, tailored health messages, can we
say these technologies provide more agency?
• Can we say that the components of agency are authoring and
customization?
Chapter 4: agency and
customization
• Author talks about the idea of receiver as source as
something new and revolutionary when in fact in most
models of communication each interactant is
simultaneously a source and receiver
• What are some applications which permit customization
that are especially useful to you?
• What are some applications, beyond email and IM,
which permit authoring, that you find useful? E.g. wikis,
forums, social networks, blogs
• If I use the Pluck application with Firefox to obtain just
exactly the news feeds and updates that I want and no
other, this is customization, and agency
• Is this interpersonal communication? Does it matter if
we do or don’t define it as such?
Chapter 4: technological
implications of self as source
• Technological implications of self as source
• Evidence that being able to customize a news
presentation and select the stories you want to read from
a menu of headlines led to lower ratings of the quality
and newsworthiness of the items than if you were told
that other users had picked the stories
• What would be the explanation for this?
– Basic need of people to have social confirmation of their choices
when no objective criteria of value are available
– Author suggests its because greater customization creates
greater involvement and more scrutiny of messages (consistent
with ELM in that greater involvement creates greater attention to
message content as opposed to source characteristics)
Chapter 4: interactivity
– Highly interactive (e.g. synchronous) and
customizable applications are preferred by
users because they give them a greater
sense of self as source
• Example, music downloads eliminate gatekeepers
like radio playlists or prepackaged albums (but
then there’s DRM) and give greater autonomy to
self
• “Interactivity an HIC affordance that allows
for CMC in its ideal form”
Chapter 4: reasons for power of
self as source
• Power of self as source derived from these
affordances of CMC technologies
– Allows for the assertion of user identity (and
superiority?)
– Allows for greater audiences for one’s authoring and
creates sense of greater import of one’s agency
– Opportunity to create new content through original
efforts or aggregation
• Greater technological support for interactivity,
greater richness of available media for authoring
enhance the resources available to the self as
source
Chapter 4: agency model of
customization
Tech
variables
contribute to
greater user
sense of
self as
source or
agency
Interactivity conceived as set of affordances for enabling rich dialogue
with system or other users; alternatively, message interdependence
within an extended sequence
Modality-sensory enrichment of environment or self-representation
Navigability- allow for user to explore environment at own pace and
choice of interaction mode
Chapter 4: agency model of
customization, cont’d
• Heightened sense of agency should produce a more
mindful attention to content and hence deeper (central
rather than peripheral) processing
• Greater sense of self-as-source should have affective
consequences in terms of personal identity in that the
traits associated with the “true self” as opposed to the
actual self should be more accessible in memory in the
internet context
– Actual self: traits that people believe they actually possess and
are usually able to express to others in social settings
– True self: traits that people believe they possess and would like
to but are not usually able to express to others in social settings
Chapter 4: agency model of
customization, cont’d
• Should have further behavioral consequences in
that self-authoring or agency produces greater
feeling of choice, self-determination, may
increase motivation, to a degree: too many
choices may lead to difficulty in making
decisions or in being satisfied with one’s choices
– Not everyone is comfortable with control and some
may prefer that choices be made for them by others,
for various reasons
– Model focuses less on how the mediators affect
cognitive, affective and behavioral outcomes and
more on how the technological variables affect the
mediator variable, self-as-source
Chapter 4: agency model of
customization, cont’d
– Agency may interact with content attributes to affect
outcome variables
– Individual difference variables may also interact with
technological variables; for example, with respect to
health information seeking, people who are “blunters”
may react very differently to the opportunity to exert
agency than people who are monitors
– Blunters may want to filter out negative information,
prefer predigested expert content, not trust their own
information seeking skills. Want to avoid rich sensory
experiences such as color photos of skin diseases,
etc- so may choose sites which don’t provide a lot of
self-as-source opportunity
Compare models