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Personal Communication by CMC

theophilusmobb

April 30, 2024

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Personal Communication by CMC

1. Introduction

The internet has fostered a new mode of relational maintenance. No longer are our nearest and dearest the only ones who it is cost effective to keep in touch with frequently. Studies looking at internet relay chat (IRC) and email have shown that people are using CMC to keep in touch with geographically dispersed friends and family. This is particularly pertinent to the students of today. A research project investigating the communication networks of first year university students revealed that most students rely on email as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family from their home towns as well as university contacts. Furthermore, the development of e-commerce has made international business deals, involving frequent communication with international clients, a common occurrence for many professionals. Email has become a preferred mode of communication in such cases due to the speed of asynchronous communication and relative ease of sorting and archiving compared with a telephone conversation. With the ability to archive and retrieve communication, CMC has been seen to be particularly useful for those wishing to secure an auditable trail of communication for legal purposes.

The rapid growth in the use of computers and the information technologies, with accompanying growth in the personal ownership of computers, has had an enormous effect on the way we interact and communicate with one another. With the growth of the internet, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become an indispensable part of our daily life. CMC has been broadly defined as any communicative transaction which occurs through the use of two or more networked computers. Examples of CMC include: email, chat, remote control software and the internet. With this growth, the relative cost effectiveness of CMC, compared with traditional face-to-face communication, has made it possible for researchers to investigate how CMC is capable of supporting interpersonal communication.

2. Advantages of Personal Communication by CMC

The advantages of personal communication by CMC include: – Decreased social and psychological cues help us to form impressions that are based on personal factors such as intelligence, attitudes, values, and personality, rather than on irrelevant factors like appearance, race, or gender. This reduces the chances of prejudice and discrimination. – De-individuation theory argues that decreased cues lead to a state of de-individuation in which an individual’s self-identity becomes more salient than his or her identity as a member of a particular social group. Thus, communication by CMC may enable people to interact with others as individuals rather than simply as members of a category such as a student, disabled person, homosexual, member of a particular racial group, or gender. As a result, people in stigmatized categories may be more able to control the impressions they make on others and hence manage their social identities. – An extension of this argument is that CMC enables relationships to form at a faster rate. This really depends on what is meant by a relationship. By relationship, it may simply mean a state of affairs when two people know each other. But generally, we speak of knowing someone when we have some idea of what they are like as a person. With CMC, information about the personal identity of another is available earlier on in an interaction. – Groups are able to form egalitarian relationships between members. All group members have an equal opportunity to contribute regardless of personal characteristics. This means that status differences between members are less influential in CMC than in face-to-face situations. High-status individuals have less influence in the decision-making process in CMC, and low-status members have more influence. This is because the verbal cues that are used to signal status differences in face-to-face interactions are less frequent and effective in CMC. This setting is particularly advantageous for women and stigmatized group members who are often the target of negative stereotypes and face discrimination from high-status group members.

3. Challenges of Personal Communication by CMC

Personal communication by CMC has its own challenges. In lean CMC, absence of nonverbal cues makes it difficult to express emotions. Emoticons can help, but it’s a pale imitation of real face-to-face communication. We are also unable to express intimacy through touch, which is an important part of personal relationships. On the other hand, hyperpersonal communication can have its problems too. Idealization can lead to disappointment when a person doesn’t meet their idealized image. High levels of affection and intimacy can develop too quickly, leading to some people feeling very uncomfortable because a relationship has grown too serious too quickly. There is also the possibility of distorted communication where things can be interpreted in a different way than intended. This can happen due to the overattribution of the message sender’s attractive qualities to a message, ambiguity of the message being interpreted in a more flirtatious manner, and the lack of communication feedback being used to clarify the sender’s meaning. These challenges can have both negative social and psychological effects on individuals.

4. Best Practices for Personal Communication by CMC

Although the asynchronous nature of CMC allows users to take their time working on messages, users should not feel that they can overcome potential message misinterpretation problems simply by composing long messages. Studies have shown that interactional “richness” in communication can be unrelated to message length and that long messages can sometimes be regarded as a waste of time. The effort to encode messages effectively should not be equated to the effort of composing long messages. Therefore, it is important to know when to stop writing.

First, people should strive to communicate in a clear and concise fashion. Through the absence of verbal and visual cues available in traditional face-to-face communication, messages can become easily misinterpreted in CMC. This can result in communicators being required to expend considerable effort engaging in “repair work” to rectify misinterpretations.

It is important to establish certain best practice guidelines when using personal CMC for work in order to maximize communication effectiveness. Many of these guidelines follow from what is known about effective interpersonal communication for traditional face-to-face communication, whereas others are quite specific to the characteristics of CMC.

5. Conclusion

It has also analyzed CMC in the context of change by considering it as an innovation in language that gives rise to both enthusiasm and concern about its effect. This is an issue which differs from generation to generation and will no doubt continue to be discussed long after CMC ceases to exist.

The essay has focused on how the many forms of CMC are now woven into our communication patterns, how we adjust our speech and interaction to the medium, and how the media itself can shape our interaction. It looked at CMC in general but also at specific areas such as email and chat, discussing how it fits into our lives and the implications it has on the way we communicate.

This essay has explained the importance of CMC in today’s language. Drawing both on linguistic and social psychological theories and research, it has considered how CMC is now extensively integrated into our everyday communication.