12: The Future

This course has shown me that the communication mediums and the internet are constantly evolving. The theories, psychological spaces, and systems set up today, will most likely be different in the future. Many of the thoeries we've learned throughout this semester will apply and adapt to the new mediums that we will have. However, there will also be some that I can not see lasting very long.

As long as there are channels which limit the amount of non-verbal cues, I believe that the Social Information Processing theory will hold true. The idea that over time, non-verbal cues will be adapted into the verbal channel can really be applied to any leaner medium in my opinion. Also, there will always be some forms of selective self presentation. I also feel that SIDE will still be able to be applied in many areas. However, visual anonymity will be a lot rarer in the future. As social presence theory states, greater bandwith allows for more cues. Since bandwith can only go up from here, and it is already getting quite large, visual anonymity will play less importance into a lot of things. Many of the communication theories that existed before CMC was a part of this area of study will come back into play simply because the amount of cues available through CMC in the future will be drastically larger. This will also render the hyperpersonal model less effective, since this increase in non-verbal cues available in CMC will result in an increased breadth of our CMC partners. I feel that we will still form our impressions with increased intensity, but over time, as SIP states, this will sort itself out. The amount of time this takes will be much smaller as well with the richer forms of CMC that will be available in the future.

I predict instant messaging will evolve into almost the equivalent of FtF, and computers will become even more widely used in the future. Online social spaces. As such, I also believe that from a very young age people will start to be more accustomed with a computer-mediated form of communication with a large number of non-verbal cues. This will make deception harder, and CMC will most likely be close to as commonly used as FtF. The feature-based model of deception should still hold true, but will have to be adapted since the mediums will evolve.

As technology advances, I believe that more portable forms of computers will become available, making CMC something possible from any location. This will infuse it into our daily lives, and need to be taken into account in this field of study.

This was an interesting course that was a great introduction into the psychology of social computing. I feel that this field will become more and more prevalent as computers continue to evolve and become an everyday part of our lives. This course did a great job of exploring many theories/research, both old and new. However, I feel that it would have been nice to explore the application of many of these theories in the business world. There is undoubtly a large use of these studies by corporations and companies to try to achieve success. Also, I believe that as this blog is asking us to do, some class discussions on the future of CMC would also have been very beneficial. As phones become more and more advanced, I wonder if they will finally become as advanced as our desktop PCs. With the release of the iPhone, and google's new Android platform, they're already well on their way. I feel that this means of being connected with the internet wherever you go will have to be addressed in Comm245 in the future. Overall, the class did a great job of introducing us to this area of study, but as computers and CMC continually evolve, so will the subjects discussed in this course be forced to.