International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology (IJERT) ISSN: 2278-0181 Vol. 3 Issue 1, January - 2014

Application Venues of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) : Analytical Review Chimah. Jonathan N.*; Ugwu. Okechukwu O.*; Nwokocha. Udo **

*Library & ICT Unit, National Centre for Energy Research & Development, University of Nigeria Nsukka **Library & Information Science Department, Abia Sate University Uturu

Abstract this concept2. A narrower view holds that CMC This entry first provided a description of only encompasses those applications that direly Computer-Mediated Communication (CMCs), assist human communication. That the term including areas in which computers have been used includes the word, “mediate”, implies reliance to facilitate collaboration, automation, and upon a third party or entity to enhance the management. Next it provides a framework for information flow between two or more people. This classifying various types of CMC and discusses entity adds something to the communication that each portion of the framework in terms of both helps improve (or at least provides the opportunity example applications and research topics. This to do so) the efficiency and/or effectiveness of paper also presents a discourse on how CMS information flow. The addition of elements to aid applications are used in various communication information flow is what distinguishes CMC from venues. In general these venues are: interpersonal, ordinary telephone conversations, FAX groups, and mass communication. Finally, CMC communications, and electronic broadcasts (such as research areas has been found as multidisciplinary “webinars”, which are unidirectional). An example including communications, and journalism, library of an element that a computer might provide to science, engineering and computer science, enhance communications is the storage and management, business, etc. presentation of large amounts of data, which is beyond the capability of human short-term memory Keywords: Computer-Mediated Communication, to store. From this perspective, CMC encompasses Characteristics of CMC, CMC application venues, not just the communication itself, but the entire CMC research areas process by which people create and exchange IJERTIJERTinformation using electronic systems and the extent Introduction to which computers assist the communications by Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is a adding some element of facilitation. field that studies the use of computers and related technologies as a means of facilitating human CMC can further be described according to its communication. With the decrease in cost of function. CMC is utilized in such diverse areas as computer-based systems, use as a communication teaching and learning in social networking (for and collaboration medium has increased both personal and professional reasons), for dramatically. Applications have been developed for dissemination and/or control of information, and business, educational institutions, and for entertainment of various kinds. As stated by governmental agencies to meet the demand of Chilton3 the methods by which each of these emerging environments, and to enhance personal functions are accomplished, provide additional use of social networks. Scholarly research in the ways of classifying a particular CMC system: area of CMC has mirrored this growth. .  Systems may require synchronous Computer-mediated communication is defined by communications or allow sharing or Wikipedia1 as any communication that occurs information asynchronously; through the use of two or more electronic devices.  Systems may provide for unidirectional communications or they may allow CMC has been described in various ways by interactive participation; academics and practitioners. Although some would  Systems may provide for either small or describe CMC as virtually all computer uses that large numbers of simultaneous employ a user interface or involve the manipulation participants; and of data, this description may not include data or  Systems may provide elaborate interfaces information flow between two or more people. in very controlled circumstances or they Thus, computer applications such as statistical may allow very informal settings that analysis programmes, remote-sensing systems, and utilize simple interfaces. financial modeling programmes would fit within

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Characteristics of Computer-Mediated General Applications of CMC Communication CMC scholarship covers a wide range of Communication occurring within a computer- applications. This is due in part to the number of mediated format has an effect on many different potential applications for this technology and in aspects of an interaction. Some of these that have part to the number of fields it spans. The term received attention in the scholarly literature include CMC has been used to describe research in diverse impression formation, deception, group dynamics, areas such as: electronic messaging, office 8 disclosure reciprocity, disinhibition and especially automation, distributed decision-making, ; relationship formation. electronic boardrooms, teleconferencing, informatics, computer-supported cooperative work CMC is examined and compared to other or CSCW, decision support systems and group communication media through a number of aspects support systems or GDSS, and computer-assisted 2, 10 thought to be universal to all forms of instruction of CAI. communication, including (but not limited to) synchronicity, persistence or "recordability", and In general, Computer-Mediated Communication anonymity. The association of these aspects with systems can be broken into three distinct areas different forms of communication varies widely. based on application. These areas are conferencing, For example, instant messaging is intrinsically informatics, and Computer-Aided Instructions synchronous but not persistent, since one loses all (CAI). While each area has unique characteristics, the content when one closes the dialog box unless elements common to all CMC include one has a message log set up or has manually copy- communication, computers, and information pasted the conversation. E-mail and message exchange. boards, on the other hand, are low in synchronicity since response time varies, but high in persistence Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) since messages sent and received are saved. Application Venues Properties that separate CMC from other media 1. Interpersonal also include transience, its multimodal nature, and 4 its relative lack of governing codes of conduct . CMC systems developed specifically for CMC is able to overcome physical and social communication support between two individuals or limitations of other forms of communication and within a very small group are classified as therefore allow the interaction of people who are interpersonal. Interpersonal communication not physically sharing the same space. systems can be synchronous or asynchronous with IJERTIJERTtext, audio, and video based-communication being The medium in which people choose to passed between system users. Synchronous communicate influences the extent to which people communications operate in a real-time or near real- disclose personal information. CMC is marked with time atmosphere. Text-based chat, video chat, and higher levels of self-disclosure in conversation as voice communication have all been implemented opposed to face-to-face interactions. Self disclosure using computer technologies to facilitate is any verbal communication of personally relevant synchronous interpersonal communication. information, thought, and feeling which establishes 5, Asynchronous systems generally are based on and maintains interpersonal relationships . This is stored text, audio, or video files. One of the most due in part to visual anonymity and the absence of common asynchronous interpersonal nonverbal cues which reduce concern for losing communication systems is e-mail, but other positive „Face‟ (sociological concept). According 6 applications are gaining popularity with video, text, to Walther‟s Hyperpersonal communication and audio implementations. These applications Model, computer-mediated communication is involve digitally storing information then valuable on providing a better communication and 7 transmitting them to the receiver who can listen to better first impressions. Moreover, Dunn asserts or view the message at his or her leisure3 that computer-mediated communication allows more closeness and attraction between two Text-Based Chat and Messaging individuals than a face-to-face communication. Chat and messaging systems provide a Anonymity and in part privacy and security synchronous, text-based way to communicate with depends more on the context and particular people all over the world. Most real-time chat program being used or web page being visited. systems rely on the Internet as a transmission However, most researchers in the field medium. In general terms, Internet Relay Chat acknowledge the importance of considering the (IRC) systems consist of various separate networks psychological and social implications of these of chat servers or machines that allow users to factors alongside the technical limitations. connect. Once connected to a server, text-based

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communication can begin. Besides providing a mail allows both the sender and receiver to means for interpersonal communication, chat asynchronously communicate at convenient times. systems are often used to enable communication between larger groups of people. The largest chat Asynchronous Voice and Video networks at this time are EFnet, IRCnet, QuakeNet, and Undernet. Developed as an extension to e-mail software. Asynchronous voice and video applications have Internet relay chat is currently declining in use become more popular. Digitized voice and video largely due to the popularity of instant messenger files are transmitted as attachments to email and software systems. Providers such as Yahoo, viewed or heard at a time convenient to the Microsoft, and AOL all have provided software receiver. Some messenger software allows focused on allowing users connect to the Internet asynchronous messages to be sent to off-line users. via computer or mobile device to send and receive text messages in real time. Additionally, other 2. Groups features such as webcam use, file transfers, and message storage have added to the sophistication CMC systems have also been developed and desirability of these applications. specifically to support communication within groups. Like the interpersonal systems, group CMC Video Conferencing has been developed to support both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication. Text, Interpersonal video conferencing facilitates audio, and video formats can be used to facilitate synchronous communication using video and the exchange of information between systems audio. Like many CMC tools, this communication users. In terms of synchronous communication, method can save time and reduce travel costs. chat systems, real-time video systems, networked Video conferencing software currently offers meeting systems, multiple user dialog systems, and everything from compressed low-bandwidth group collaboration systems have all been images on desktop PCs with messenger software to implemented. Asynchronous applications such as full-motion, broadcast quality video. Frequent discussion boards, blogs, and electronic mailing list users may utilize private line video conferencing software have also been developed. and less frequent users may opt for standard Internet access. Chat Systems

Voice Communication Most text-based chat systems were designed to support synchronous communication within Audio conferencing programmes digitize speech asIJERT IJERTgroups. The same applications used to support the user speaks and sends the digital data over the interpersonal communication are also used to Internet or other transmission media. Often this is support groups over the Internet or other computer called voice over IP or VOIP. In order to match networks. sound quality comparable to regular telephone service, most audio communication applications Real-Time Video compress sound information before transmitting. In full duplex conversations, sender and receiver can Several real-time video conferencing software speak and hear the other person simultaneously. In packages are currently available. Some of these half duplex applications, only one person can speak have been developed for use in educational at a time. settings. Of these, Polycom is one of the best known and most widely used. Polycom allows Various commercial products have been developed users to hold desktop video conferences using the to support audio CMC applications. Currently, Internet as a transmission channel. cable television companies market Internet phones and applications such as Skype provide VOIP Networked Meeting Software services for users via their computers. Messenger Networked meeting software generally refers to a software also incorporates VOIP services for users package which supports synchronous collaboration via their computers. Messenger software also tools like group chats, shared whiteboards, incorporates VOIP services. multiuser editors, Web slide shows, or and shared E-mail applications running simultaneously on the Internet or other network. A number of these platforms Electronic mail or e-mail provides a means of have emerged in both the business and education sending text-based messengers over a arenas. communications channel. E-mail is similar to regular mail with an added advantage – speed. E-

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Multiple User Dialog a relic of early Internet use. Their functionality has largely been replaced with Blogs and discussion A variety of multiuser environments have become boards which provide much of the same available to support real-time group functionality. communication and collaboration over computer networks. Multiple User Dialogs or MUDs and Electronic Mailing Lists related systems such as Object-Oriented MODs were derived from systems developed by the Like newsgroups, electronic mailing lists are an gaming community in the 1970s and 1980s. Many asynchronous group communication technology. of the original MUDs have been extended to Mailing lists use e-mail technology to disseminate provide real-time conferencing and collaborative information and facilitate discussion. In many environments. Sometimes called text-based virtual mailing list systems, a user subscribes to a list. realities, these multi-user environments can be used After acceptance, copies of every message sent to to facilitate group interaction through supporting the group will be routed to each member on the list. software. In other words, the decision of one user If the list is moderated each message will be can impact the perceived environment of another reviewed by a moderator prior to being user. Synchronous communication is usually a disseminated to each member. Most mailing lists component of the system. When logged onto a will have three email addresses. These are: MUD, an individual types rather than talks, reads rather than listens, and manipulates programs to  The Subscription e-mail: To subscribe to describe themselves and the current state of the the list virtual environment. Resulting descriptions are  The List e-mail: To send messages to the generally text-based and in real time. list.  The Administrator/Moderator e-mail: To Groupware and Collaboration contact the administrator or moderator of the list. Groupware encompasses a wide set of technologies used to support interpersonal and group Mailing lists fall into two categories, manual and collaboration. Groupware ranges from e-mail to automatic. Manual lists are generally moderated or Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS) to workflow controlled by a particular person. This person collaboration tools. Generally speaking, groupware accepts, rejects, or edits message contents. provides tools to solve collaboration-oriented Automatic lists are not generally moderated. business problems. The general concept driving Instead computer programmes called robots are groupware is the intent to foster collaboration and used for administration. Two common robots are interpersonal productivity. This is accomplishedIJERT IJERTLISTERV and Majordomo. through the technical automation and enhancement of a variety of tasks. Some groupware applications Social Networking Software seek to integrate the functionality of e-mail with other technologies such as calendar/scheduling Like groupware, social networking software software. Others integrate group work processes, provides communication capabilities suited to workflows, and meetings 11. group communication situations. However, beyond group communication, social networking also Newsgroups and Blogs allows participants to engage in individual discussions and mass communication within a Unlike the related asynchronous interpersonal shared environment. In general, social networking CMC technology, e-mail, newsgroups facilitate focuses on the construction and development of group asynchronous communication. Rather than like-minded online communities and provides a receiving messages directly, newsgroup messages variety of Web-enabled ways for users to interact. are posted to groups. These groups are organized Social networking is currently used by millions of into topic headings. The user can decide which people in both work settings and in their personal topics are of interest and choose which messages to lives. Some of the most common social networking view or download. An early newsgroup system was sites are MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Second called the Usenet. Usenet was an international Life (a virtual 3-D social network), and Cyworld forum where asynchronous discussions on myriad (also 3-D). topics are constantly taking place. Usenet discussion was been described as liberating 3. Mass because of its anonymous nature. As in many applications of CMC, participants are judged on CMC systems have also been developed their words, rather than on outward appearance, specifically for mass communication. This means age, or gender. Newsgroups have declined in computer systems facilitate one-to-many popularity over time until they have almost become

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communication in either a synchronous or Computer-Mediated Communication Research asynchronous mode. Areas

Text CMC research has been found in a multitude of disciplines including communications and Technologies such as mailing lists, newsgroups, journalism, library science, engineering and and Web sites have been implemented to computer science, business, criminology and effectively allow one-to-many communication. forensics, knowledge and operations management, This is particularly true of mediated newsgroups, education, psychology, including cognitive science, Blogs, and mailing lists where a single individual is sociology and anthropology, law and ethics, and able to communicate to an audience which cannot both human and veterinary medicine. Research is be limited. not limited to each single discipline, however, and the norm is more multidisciplinary. For examples, Audio engineering teams with medicine to discover new ways of treating and detecting disease and Systems have been developed to present real-time communicating these techniques to both engineers audio over the Internet and other networks. Users and physicians; computer science may team with with conventional multimedia personal computers, anthropology do discover new ways to analyze a network connection, and the appropriate software ancient texts. are able to listen to real-time sound broadcasts. The term podcasts has been used as descriptor. As research helps humankind to improve the sharing of information and to solve intractable Video problems, much of the problem solving is turned over to the computer because of its ability to store One-to-many video applications operate over the massive amounts of data and recall it quickly and Internet and other networks. Multicast provides to process massive numbers of calculations in a one-to-many and many-to-many networks delivery short period of time. Thus, this type of research is services. Sometimes called video casting, Vidcasts, autocatalytic in nature – bigger and more powerful video podcasts, video streaming has become a very machines allow us to solve more problems, and this important Internet application. Web sites such as in turn provides even more problems to solve. This YouTube and iTunes have provided infrastructure germinates the need for bigger and better machines, that has allowed video casting to become and the cycle is repeated3. The other end other end commonplace. of the research spectrum focuses on the user. Such The CMC applications venues disused areIJERT IJERTquestions as the perceived value of an information summarized in the table 1: system, the perceived success of an installed information system, and how well a user is able to S/ Interpersonal Groups Mass interact with a system (so-called human-computer N interaction) are some of areas which have received 1 Text-Based Chat Chat Systems Text a lot of attention. Additional topical areas fall in and Messaging between the devices and the programmes and the 2 Video Real-Time Video Audio users, and include group work and interactions, Conferencing individual work, performance and productivity 3 Voice Networked Video enhancement, software that supports social Communication Meeting networking, religion and cross cultural issues, Software security, cyber and information warfare, comparisons of different communications 4 E-mail Multiple User Dialog techniques, and entertainment. 5 Asynchronous Groupware and Conclusion voice and video Collaboration 6 Newsgroups and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) has Blogs been defined and explained. While the term has 7 Electronic traditionally referred to those communications that Mailing Lists occur via computer-mediated formats (e.g., instant 8 Social messaging, email, chat rooms), it has also been Networking applied to other forms of text-based interaction Software such as text messaging. Research on CMC focuses Source: Tabulation – Authors’ largely on the social effects of different computer- supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software.

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There are basically three areas of CMC systems References applications: conferencing, informatics, and Computer-Aided Instructions (CAI). While each 1. Wikipedia. Computer-Mediated Communication. area has unique characteristics, elements common (Accessed on 12/11/2013 from): to all CMC include communication, computers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computer- and information exchange. Characteristics of CMC mediated_communication#cite_note-1 were briefly highlighted on communication occurring within a computer-mediated format 2. Santoro, G.M. What is computer-mediated which has an effect on many different aspects of an communication? In Computer Mediated interaction. These include impression formation, Communication and the Online Classroom. deception, group dynamics, disclosure reciprocity, Overview and Perspectives, Berge, .Z.I. Collins, disinhibition and especially relationship formation. M.P., Eds.; Hampton: Cresskill, NJ, vol. I. 1995.

CMC has been classified viewing how applications 3. Chilton, M. A. Computer-Mediated are used in various communication venues. In Communication (CM). In Encyclopedia of Library rd general, these venues are: Interpersonal (Text- and Information Sciences. 3 Ed. Vol. II; 2010. Based Chat and Messaging, Video Conferencing, Voice Communication, E-mail, Asynchronous 4. McQuail, D. “Mcquail's Mass Communication voice and video); Groups (Chat Systems, Real- Theory”. 5th ed. London: SAGE Publications. Time Video, Networked Meeting Software, 2005. Multiple User Dialog, Groupware and Collaboration, Newsgroups and Blogs, Electronic 5. Jiang, C., Bazarova, N., & Hancock, J. From Mailing Lists, Social Networking Software); and perception to behavior: Disclosure Mass (Text, Audio and Video). reciprocity and the intensification of intimacy in computer-mediated communication. Research areas in Computer-Mediated Communication Research, 2011. 40, 125-143. Communication is not limited to each single 6. Walther, J. B. Computer-mediated discipline, the norm is rather more communication: Impersonal, interpersonal, and multidisciplinary, covering science, engineering, hyperpersonal interaction. Communication humanities and social sciences disciplines. Research, 1996. 23, 3-43.

7. Dunn., R. Identity Theories and Technology. East Tennessee State University, USA. 2013. p.30. IJERTIJERT 8. Wellens, A.R. Group situation awareness and distributed decision making. Individual and Group Decision Making, Castellan, N.J., Jr. Ed.; Lawrence Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ, 1993. 267-293

9. Jessup, L.M. & Valacich, J.S. On the study of group support systems: An introduction to group support system research and development. In Group Support Systems, Jessup, L.M., Valacich, J.S., Eds.; Macmillan: New York, 1993; 3-7

10. Ferris, P. What is CMC? An overview of scholarly definitions. (accessed from): http://www.december.com/cm/mag/1997/jan/ferap p.html .1997.

11. Coleman, D. Groupware: Technology and Applications; Prentice Hall: Englewood

Cliffs, NJ, 1995

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