Seven Key Concepts (lesson 3)

If we want to build a rich understanding of how media influence personal connection, we need to stop talking about media in overly simplistic terms. We can not talk about consequences if we cannot articulate capabilities. What is about these media that can change interaction and potentially relationship? 

Seven Key concepts, that can be used to productivity compare different media to an another as well as to face to face communication are: 

1- Interactivity

2- Temporal structure

3- Social cues

4- Storage

5- Replicability

6- Reach

7- Mobility 

1-Interactivity

 The many modes of communication on the internet and mobile phone vary in the degrees and kinds of interactivity they offer. Consider, for example, the difference between using your phone to select a new ringtone and using that phone to argue with a romantic partner, or using a website to buy new shoes rather than to discuss the current events. 

"Social interactivity", is the ability of a medium to enable social interaction between groups or individuals. this is what we are almost interested in this semester.

Other kind, include technical interactivity: A medium's capability to letting human users manipulate the machine via the interface and Textual interactivity: the creative and interpretive interaction between users (readers, listeners) and the texts. 

Unlike television, online communication technologies allow you to talk back. You can talk back to a big company of you can talk back to individual citizens. 

2- Temporal structure

Synchronous communication, such as is found in face to face conversations, phone calls, and instant messages, occurs in real time. Asynchronous communication media, such as email and voice mail, have time delay between the messages. 

In practice, the distinction cannot always be tied to specific media. Poor connections may lead to tome delays in a seemingly synchronous online medium such as Instant message. Text messaging via telephone is often asynchronous, but needn't be. 

Ostensibly asynchronous email maybe sent and received so rapidly that it  functions as a synchronous mode of communication. The beauty of synchronous media is that they allow for the very rapid transmission of message, even across distance.

As we will see, synchronicity can enhance the sense of placelessness that digital media can encourage and make people feel more together when they are apart. Synchronicity can make messages feel more immediate and personal and encourage playfulness in interaction. The price of synchronicity is that the interactions mist be able to align their schedules in order to me simultaneously engaged. 

Real-time media are also poorly suited to hosting interaction in large groups, as the rapid-fire succession of message that comes from having many people involved is nearly impossible to sort through and comprehend, let alone answer. 

With asynchronous media, the cast and benefits are reserved. Asynchronous communication allows very large groups to sustain interaction, As seen in the social network sites and online groups like fan pages, support groups. Asynchronous also gives people tome to manage their self-presentations more strategically. however word may filter more slowly through such groups and amongst individuals. one of the biggest changes happened by digital media is that even asynchronous communication can happen faster than before.  

3- Social Cues

Social cues is a term used to describe the non-verbal hints to guide conversation. 

Body-to-body, people have a full range of communicative resources available for them. They share a physical context which they can refer to non-verbally as well as verbally (for instance, by pointing to a chair). They are subject to the same environmental influences and distractions. They see one another's body movements, including the facial expressions through which to some meaning is conveyed. They can use each other's eye gaze to gauge attention. They can see one another's appearance. They can hear the sound of one another's voice. All these are important to interpreting message and creating a social context within which message are meaningful. 

To varying degrees, digital media provide fewer social cues. In mobile and online interactions, we may have few if any cues to our partner's location. This is no doubt why so many mobile phone calls start with "where are you"? and also helps to explain some people's desire to use GPS. 

People communicating in personal relationship share relational context, knowledge and some history. People in online groups often develop rich in-group social environments that those who are participated for any length of time will recognize. 

Some media convey very little information about the identities of those who we are communicating. In some circumstances, this renders people anonymous, leading both for opportunity and terror. 

to be continued...

New forms of personal connection

There have never been more ways to communicate with one another than there are right now. Once limited to face to face conversation, over the last several millennia we have steadily developed new technologies for interaction.

The digital age is distinguished by rapid transformation in the kind of technological mediation through which we encounter one another.

Face to face conversation, land line telephone calls and postal mail have been joined by email, mobile phone calls, text messaging, instant messaging, chat, web boars, social networks, photo sharing, video sharing, multi player gaming and more.

In this time of rapid innovation and diffusion, it is natural to be concerned about their effects on our relationships.

When first faced with a new barrage in interpersonal communication media, people tend to react in one of the two ways:

1.       People express concern that out communication become increasingly shallow. For many, the increased amount of mediated interaction seems to threaten the sanctity of out personal relationship.

2.       For others, new media offer the promise of more opportunity for connection with more people, a route to new opportunities and to stronger relationships and more diverse connections.

Both of these show that digital media are changing the nature of our social connection.

·         New media, new boundaries

The place of digital media in our lives, and their consequences for our personhood relationship with others:

Technologies affect how we see the word, our communities, our relationship and our selves when they are new. Even electricity, telegraph or telephone creates a point in history. This leads to anxiety.

The fundamental purpose of communication technologies from their ancient inception has been to allow people to exchange messages without being physically co-present.

Until the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s, this ability to transcend space brought with in inevitable time delay. Messages could take years to reach their audience. The telegraph changed that by allowing real-time communication across long distance for the first time. It collapsed time and space.

Digital media raised different questions:

•  How can we present yet be absent? 
• What is self if it is not in a body? 
•  How can we have so much control yet lose so much freedom? 
•  What does personal communication means when it is transmitted through a mass medium?
•  What is a mass medium if it is used by personal communication? 
•  What do private and public mean anymore? 
•  What does it mean to be real?

 

We are described as struggling with the “challenge of absent present”, worrying that too often we inhabit a “floating word” in which we engage primarily with non-present partners despite the presence of flash-and-blood people in our physical location. We may be present in one space, yet mentally and emotionally engaged elsewhere. Let me give you one example: the dinner partner who is immersed in his mobile phone conversation. Since he is physically present, yet simultaneously absent, the very nature of self becomes problematic. Where is”he”?  This is the collapse of borders between human and machine.

Some people feel that their “real self” is best expressed online.

How do we know where, exactly, true selves reside? What if the selves enacted through digital media don’t line up with those we present face-to-face? Or if they contradict one another? If someone is nurturing face to face, aggressive in one online forum and needy in another online forum, which one is real? Is there such a thing as a true self anymore? Was there ever?

New media offer us “volume control” to regulate our social environment and manage our encounters. We can create new opportunities to converse. We can avoid interactions, we can manipulate out interactions, doing things like forwarding nasty emails or putting people on speakerphone. We can use non-verbally limited media such as text messages or emails to shelter us from anxiety-including encounters such as flirting or ending relationships, but just we can use these media to manage others more strategically, others can also more easily manage us. Our autonomy is increasingly constrained by the expectation that we can be reached for communication anytime, anywhere. We are “perpetual contact” now.

One of the most exiting elements of new media is that they allow us to communicate personally within large groups.

This blurs the boundary between mass and interpersonal communication in ways that disrupt both. When people gather in an online space to talk about a T.V show, they are a mass communication audience, but the communication they have with on another is both interpersonal, directed to individuals within the group, and mass, available for anyone to read it. If the conversation and materials these fans produce for one another are incorporated in to the T.V show, the boundaries between production and reception of mass media are blurred as well. 

.... to be continued