Several theories and much experimental research on relational tone in computer-mediated communication (CMC) points to the lack of nonverbal cues in this channel as a cause of impersonal and task-oriented messages. Field research in CMC often reports more positive relational behavior. This article examines the assumptions, methods, and findings of such research and suggests that negative relational effects are confined to narrow situational boundary conditions. Alternatively, it is suggested that communicators develop individuating impressions of others through accumulated CMC messages. Based upon these impressions, users may develop relationships and express multidimensional relational messages through verbal or textual cues. Predictions regarding these processes are suggested, and future research incorporating these points is urged.

Interpersonal Effects in Computer-Mediated Interaction: A Relational Perspective

The Internet is the latest in a series of technological breakthroughs in interpersonal communication, following the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television. It combines innovative features of its predecessors, such as bridging great distances and reaching a mass audience. However, the Internet has novel features as well, most critically the relative anonymity afforded to users and the provision of group venues in which to meet others with similar interests and values. We place the Internet in its historical context, and then examine the effects of Internet use on the user's psychological well-being, the formation and maintenance of personal relationships, group memberships and social identity, the workplace, and community involvement. The evidence suggests that while these effects are largely dependent on the particular goals that users bring to the interaction—such as self-expression, affiliation, or competition—they also interact in important ways with the unique qualities of the Internet communicat...

The Internet and Social Life

Mobility, immediacy, and instrumentality are found the strongest instrumental motives in predicting the use of cellular phones, followed by intrinsic factors such as affection/sociability. Subscription to functionally enhanced services such as call transfers and caller ID appears to be important predictors for overall cellular phone use, especially for those who are on the go. As expected, the use of cellular phones on buses, cars, and trains or in malls and restaurants is strongly linked to mobility and immediate access gratifications. Further, young and less educated women tend to talk longer on each call. Finally, talking to co-workers and business partners via cellular phones appears to be for instrumental reasons, while talking to immediate family members is for mobility and showing affection.

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More Than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone

This article investigates a new communication medium—public computer conferencing—by separately and jointly analyzing two basic aspects of human communication: (1) content, the extent to which such systems can support socioemotional communication, and (2) connectivity, communication patterns among system users. Results indicate that (1) computer-mediated communication systems can facilitate a moderate exchange of socioemotional content and (2) basic network roles did not generally differ in percentage of socioemotional content. Some fundamental issues in analyzing content and networks in computer-mediated systems, such as structural equivalence versus cohesion network approaches, are discussed in light of these results.

Electronic Emotion Socioemotional Content in a Computer-Mediated Communication Network

In this theoretical article, we introduce the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM), a new, integrative model to improve our understanding of media effects The DSMM organizes, integrates, and extends the insights developed in earlier microlevel media-effects theories It distinguishes 3 types of susceptibility to media effects: dispositional, developmental, and social susceptibility Using the analogy of a mixing console, the DSMM proposes 3 media response states that mediate media effects: cognitive, emotional, and excitative The assumptions on which the DSMM is based together explain (a) why some individuals are more highly susceptible to media effects than others, (b) how and why media influence those individuals, and (c) how media effects can be enhanced or counteracted

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The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model

Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World

The author of this essay argues the thesis that the true movement is a kind of “agonistic ritual” whose most distinguishing form is confrontation.

Movements: Confrontation as rhetorical form

Traditional conceptualizations of communication have excluded media or relegated them to a minor role as components of channel. Furthermore, the exclusive identification of media with “mass communication” has restricted understanding of the symbiotic relationship of media and interpersonal communication. This essay argues that media pervade all dimensions of human communication and must be considered in all research. It examines the category “mediated interpersonal communication” and suggests that it be added to the communication typology.

Mediated interpersonal communication: Toward a new typology

(1972). New approaches to the study of movements: Defining movements rhetorically. Western Speech: Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 82-88.

New approaches to the study of movements: Defining movements rhetorically

This essay argues that the traditional concept of the “generation” as the signifier of separate human time relationships be replaced by the concept of human groups based on media relationships. It takes the position that today people are connected or separated more by media experience than by chronological years. This position is developed through an examination of how new media develop their own grammars, the way individuals acquire media literacy, and the effects of media literacy on ways people relate to the world and each other. It concludes that people develop different states of media consciousness based upon the order of acquisition of media grammars, and that particular media consciousness produce media gaps which separate people.

Robert Cathcart

Papers

Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World

Movements: Confrontation as rhetorical form

Mediated interpersonal communication: Toward a new typology

New approaches to the study of movements: Defining movements rhetorically

Media grammars, generations, and media gaps