Notes of the second lecture in course Theories and Interpretation of Interactive Media

1. Theories and interpretation of
interactive media 2 /
Vuorovaikutteisen median
teoriat ja tulkinta 2
Frans Mäyrä
Professor of hypermedia,
esp. digital culture and game studies
University of Tampere, Hypermedia Laboratory
frans.mayra@uta.fi

2. Lecture 2:
“PC / communication”:
Theories of computer mediated
communication

3. Expanding the characteristics
of IT
• The first lecture discussed IT primarily in terms of
data: hypermedia was interpreted to be new way of
organising, representing and using information
• Today, we discuss IT in terms of communication it
facilitates
• What are the key characteristics of computer-
mediated communication?
• How it has developed, and how it affects new media
when understood as media?

4. Communication in early
computers
• In multi-user environments it is possible to write
messages into files other people can then access
• With timesharing computers it became possible to
exchange messages simultaneously, in real time
• First chat programs were created in the early 1960s
• In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created user@host
convention to allow email exchanges between
different computers in ARPANET
• Both synchronous and asynchronous communications
were thus established

5. Electronic communications
• Electronic communication predates computers
• When telegraph was launched in 1840s in America and Britain,
after initial resistance it gained huge success and even utopian
expectations
• Transatlantic cable in 1858 led some to predict world peace
and end to prejudices
• There were stories of relationships built through telegraph,
and even one “on-line wedding” has been recorded
• Tom Standage has compared telegraph to the Internet (The
Victorian Internet, 1998)

7. Communications and cultural
change
• Manner of communicating has major significance to how social life
and human relationships are organised
• Walter Ong’s thesis (Orality and Literacy, 1982) is that our
communication systems restructure our consciousness
• E.g. introducing writing into an oral culture has meant externalisation
of memory, move from aural dominance to visual dominance,
objectification of concepts and a general separation of meaning from
speaker
• Marshall McLuhan claims (The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962) that if new
technologies extend our senses outside us (e.g. as in tele-vision),
there will be consequences, cognitive and cultural changes
• Thus, print is the technology of individualism, but “electronic
interdependence” (through digital media) will lead to new tribalism
and social organisation as global village (“small world of tribal drums”
… and terror…)

9. Communicational
characteristics of new media
• IT can be used to deliver traditional mass media (newspapers,
radio, television), but its “native media” is interactive new
media
• Rather than one-to-one (of personal communication) or one-
to-many model of broadcast communication, new media
emphasises the role of many-to-many communication
• New media communication can also be multimodal (utilizing
multiple modalities, or rich media: text, image, video, sound,
interactive simulation) within the context of media
convergence
• New media communication can maintain creation of online
social networks (“virtual communities”) and
• Rather than formally finished or closed, new media
communication emphasises casual, informal, personally
invested style of communicating

11. Successes in CMC
• Email: the most popular form of computer-mediated
communication for personal and group use (estimated 60
billion email messages were sent every business day in 2006;
source: http://www.idc.com/)
• Usenet news: a group, many-to-many discussion forum tool,
later partly superseded by the various message forums in
World Wide Web
• IRC: Internet Relay Chat (by Jarkko Oikarinen, 1988): a
synchronous, group communication tool based on user-defined
chat channels
• Blog: web log, chronological personal online publishing,
typically open for comments and discussions that provide links
to other networked media - evolved from online diaries of mid-
1990s
Image source: www.wikimedia.org

12. Theories of CMC
• As predominantly text-based communication, CMC relates to
reduction of social cues
• Weak sense of social presence often translates to uninhibited
behaviour - both in positive and negative senses (e.g. flaming
to provoke others)
• Feeling protected, people can open up more easily, and also
socially insecure, or disabled persons can become empowered
to communicate and socialize
• Related both to increased social interaction, and loneliness
(may prove addictive, and does not necessarily translate to
social benefits outside Internet)
Sources, see: http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1995/feb/berge.html
http://www.emoderators.com/papers/flames.html

13. A personal computer?
• Freedom to use computer for personal
communication and self-expression has
increased as IT has become more affordable
and accessible
• Hobbyists and companies provided access to
first personal computers (Datapoint 2200,
Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080)
• The second generation home computers
were more capable for media use and
manufactured & sold in large quantities (e.g.
Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore PET,
Commodore 64 etc.)
• Then the design and release of IBM PC in
1981 provided a standard for personal
computers
Image source: www.wikimedia.org

14. Decentralisation of media
• An early example of personal computer based media was BBS (bulletin
board systems) which were running in PCs and connected with using
modems and phone lines
• A typical BBS might allow its users to subscribe, read and post
messages in message boards, publish articles, play games and
download software
• Due to long distance phone costs, BBS was mostly a local
phenomenon, supporting a sense of community
• New media has been associated with fragmentation of audiences,
decentralisation and lack of authoritative control
• Rather than a unified, mass media environment, the contemporary
media environment is hybrid and plural melange of media and
messages - even clothing and other consumer products have become
involved in close relationships with various forms of media

15. In-between media
• New media cannot be defined as interpersonal communication
or mass media - but it can be both
• Neither is it completely decentralised, anarchic or free
• Generally new media relies more on user participation and
choices than traditional media, but not all new media forms
are highly interactive
• As digital media technologies provide more flexible
functionalities than print, radio or television, it is easier to
develop hybrid, in-between media formats
• New media can also be theorised as a transformative aspect in
all media - it is continuously renegotiated and reinvented

16. Early utopian CMC theories
• “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more
effectively through a machine than face to face.” (J.C.R.
Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, ”The Computer as
Communication Device”, 1968)
– We can say with genuine and strong conviction that a particular form of
digital computer organization, with its programs and its data, constitutes
the dynamic, moldable medium that can revolutionize the art of
modeling and that in so doing can improve the effectiveness of
communication among people so much as perhaps to revolutionize that
also.
– To appreciate the import ante the new computer-aided communication
can have, one must consider the dynamics of “critical mass,” as it applies
to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the
name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to
its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual
partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another.
Source: Licklider & Taylor: “Computer as Communications Device”:
ftp://gatekeeper.research.compaq.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-061.pdf

17. Source: Licklider & Taylor: “Computer as Communications Device”:
ftp://gatekeeper.research.compaq.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/SRC-061.pdf

18. CMC and community
formation
• CMC can augment existing social relationships, as well as
create new personal relationships, some of which remain
totally “online” (no face-to-face contact)
• Most “organic communities” have been born out of common
location, family, religion, ethnicity, shared school, work,
vocation etc.
• Most “online communities” are based on shared interests and
are voluntary in nature
• Online social relationships can be strong and enduring, even if
majority of online exchanges remain casual (“weak ties”,
rather than strong ones in social network analysis)

19. Net citizen
• The collaborative and democratic potential of online communications
was conceptualised by Michael Hauben, who coined ‘Netizen’:
– My initial research concerned the origins and development of the global discussion
forum Usenet....I wanted to explore the larger Net and what it was and its
significance. This is when my research uncovered the remaining details that helped
me to recognize the emergence of Netizens. There are people online who actively
contribute towards the development of the Net. These people understand the value
of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications.
– These are the people who discuss and debate topics in a constructive manner, who
e-mail answers to people and provide help to new-comers, who maintain FAQ files
and other public information repositories, who maintain mailing lists, and so on.
These are people who discuss the nature and role of this new communications
medium. These are the people who act as citizens of the Net.
• However, it is reported that Michael Hauben (1973-2001) himself
committed suicide, due to insufficient economical, medical and social
support in his “real life”
Sources: http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/, http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/9/9180/1.html,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hauben

20. Online social networks
• Nancy K. Baym has described how
participants in CMC
– develop forms of expression that enable them to
communicate social information and to create
and codify group-specific identities, form
relationships that span from the playfully
antagonistic the deeply romantic and that move
between the network and face-to-face
interaction, and create norms that serve to
organize interaction and to maintain desirable
social climates (Baym 1998, 62).
Source: Baym, Nancy K (1998) quot;The Emergence of On-Line Communityquot;. In: Steven Jones (ed.)
Cybersociety 2.0. Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. London:
Sage, 35-68.

21. Virtual and real communities
• In 1990s there was certain “hype” associated with the
revolutionary potentials of new & online media
• Among key concepts of the period were cyberspace, virtual
reality and virtual community
• Journalist and author Howard Rheingold popularised the
concept in his book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on
the Electronic Frontier (1993)
• Rheingold’s definition: “social aggregations that emerge from
the Net when enough people carry on … public discussions long
enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of
personal relationships in cyberspace”
• Sociologist Barry Wellman has pointed out that typically online
and offline life are integrated and interrelated in many ways
Sources: http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/,
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/contexts/contexts-3a.pdf

22. Social offline, social online
• Barry Wellman:
– People who frequently use the Internet to contact others also tend to be in
frequent contact with people in other ways (even after taking into account
differences of age, gender and education). Extroverts especially benefit from
its use, as they add another means of communication to their contact
repertoire. Thus, a 2001 National Geographic survey reports that North
Americans who use email to discuss important matters do so an average of 41
times per month, in addition to 84 face-to-face discussions and 58 phone
discussions. Those who do not use email to discuss important matters have
about the same number of monthly face-to-face discussions, 83, but only 36
phone discussions. Adding these numbers up, those who use email report 183
discussions per month, 54% more than the 119 discussions for those who do not
use email. The result is that the more email, the more overall communication.
Source: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/contexts/contexts-3a.pdf

23. Media and communication
join together
• Text continues as key mode of CMC, even with increase of
broadband connections
• However, new services allow text-based communications to
integrate with rich media
• In addition, social links (social networking, social media, Web
2.0) provide added value to communications around and with
media
• But using “rich media” does not in itself automatically improve
the quality of communication
• The real significance is in smarter access and visualisation of
social relationships which have so far been “invisible” reality
Source: Dennis, and Kinney, “Testing Media Richness Theory in the New Media: the Effects of
Cues, Feedback, and Task Equivocality.” Info. Sys. Research 9, no. 3 (1998): 256-274.

24. A new paradigm emerging?