Bonus Blog: Predictions for the Future

After learning about the Psychology of Social Computing this past semester, it is evident that many of the theories/phenomena we discussed will remain relevant in years to come while others will need to be altered as rapid changes in technology occur.

The Media Richness Theory is one theory that I think will hold true. According to the Media Richness Theory, people use richer media (FTF) for more equivocal tasks and leaner media for less equivocal tasks (CMC). I think that this theory will remain true because in time, the focus on efficiency has increased. If you think about society today people rarely use the phone anymore (a richer media) for quick questions. Instead, there is text messaging and even blackberries have made it possible to send quick emails. In time, I predict the focus on efficiency will only increase and CMC communication will be utilized even more often for unequivocal tasks.

The phenomena of online social networks will also hold true. Haythornwaite explains that online communities are like one big in-group. Gemeinschaft or a community is based on strong interpersonal ties, shared focus or purpose and common language identity. I think as technology increases, online communities will become even stronger and greater. People will be able to connect with similar others despite location differences. Especially with our generation and the use of facebook, keeping in touch with people from the same school is now possible as a result of CMC. Even moving out of the transfer center sophomore year, I was able to stay in touch with many of my friends and make plans to see them face to face through social networking. As more people log online and more online networks are created, I think that technology will play a large role in connecting people of similar interests around the world. I think social support groups will also increase in time as more people become familiar with the internet.

My prediction is that as our society becomes more technologically advanced, the hyperpersonal model will not be as relevant. The hyperpersonal model predicts that after an initial interaction in CMC, a person will rate their CMC partner on fewer characteristics and these ratings will be more intense or exaggerated. As skpe, youtube and other video sites become more popular, I think chatrooms, instant messages, facebook will begin to apply this technology and as a result the difference between FTF and CMC impression formation will decrease. The basis behind the hyperpersonal model is that there are “limited social and interpersonal cues” in CMC. However, if real-time video use increases, social and interpersonal cues will be more recognizable over CMC. Selective self presentation will be more difficult because now you will be able to see the person and the ability to mask your negative traits and nonverbal cues will not be as easy.

I also think that the use of CMC for digital deception will change as a result of an increase in technology. People use CMC for digital deception because there are less cues, users can take more time and edit remarks before sending. I think that message and identity deception will decrease because using CMC will become more similar to interacting FTF. As I explained before, the use of video will make deception more difficult. I also predict that the use of the internet will become more synchronous in all respects. Instant feedback has become a necessity in society and this makes it harder to deceive another online.

The use of video technology will need to be addressed. When it is appropriate to have an online FTF interaction and when is it not necessary is certainly an issue. I could see instant messaging in the future turning into some kind of FTF video interaction but I do not think this may be necessary for changing email or facebook. Also, as CMC is used more often, an issue that must be addressed is assuring FTF interaction does not decline. As kids spend more and more time on the internet instant messaging and playing games, society needs to make sure this does not take away from everyday social activities.

I thoroughly enjoyed COMM245 and I think that what we learned about is very relevant to society today. Currently, I am writing a thesis on the use of facebook and social network sites by employers and I would be interested to know the extent that these sites are being used to find out more information about potential and current employees. Overall, thanks for a great semester!

Bonus Blog: The Future of Psychology of Social Computing

With the rapid rate at which technology is growing and changing today, it is hard to predict what will happen in the future. Although, it seems like most of the aspects of the hyperpersonal model will continue to hold. This model has been consistently referred to in our Comm 245 class. The hyperpersonal model utilizes the technological aspect of computer-mediated communication to assist in forming relationships and impression management. One aspect from the hyperpersonal model that will be continually used in the future is selective self-presentation. Individuals will intentionally select positive and desirable cues to present while minimizing physical and behavioral cues. This makes sense because people strive to be liked so we want to present positive features about ourselves rather than negative ones. In addition, the Media Richness Theory will continue to exist since people will seek to find the optimal match between equivocality of a communication task and the richness of the medium. Although there may be some exceptional cases, in general, lean media is good for unequivocal tasks. Media richness theory says that sometimes lean media, where there are reduced cues, is better in certain situations and in other situations, a richer media is better. Depending on what we aim to accomplish, we will use certain media over others.

In the future, I think the use of videoconferencing and audio chatting will become more popular and our technological (CMC) world will be more and more similar to our FtF world. The lack of visual cues and vocal cues that CMC has today will be greatly reduced. With this in mind, I think that CFO is one of the theories that will cease to exist in the future. We have continually come across examples that disprove the cues-filtered-out perspective in class. CFO says that the reduction of social cues produces negative outcomes but we have found examples where people have developed positive, intimate relationships. In addition, I think one of the dimensions of psychological spaces, anonymity, will be reduced with the increase in social networking sites and the possible increase of videoconferencing and audio chatting. In class, we learned that anonymity is the degree to which the space reveals participant identities with sub-dimensions, which include visibility, audibility, and self-expression. In the past 20 years, we have already developed many ways to reduce the anonymity dimension online, such as social networking sites, and it only seems reasonable to assume that it will be continually reduced with more advanced technology that can allow for more social interaction.

I think that as technology continues to rapidly increase, we will have more cases of problematic internet usage. When I looked for articles about internet addictions, I found the following describing the current issues with Internet usage. “More psychologists are plunging into Internet addiction research, fascinated by its emotional, psychological and social implications. In their work, they are finding a subset of people who spend so much time online, especially in sexual encounters, that they report problems in their marriages, families and work.” People’s internet lives are greatly affecting their FtF lives and their relationships with others. This may become more of a problem in the future.

In addition, issues regarding social network websites like Facebook will need to be addressed as it is becoming more popular. Employers have already developed ways to look at interviewees’ (college students) profiles and their backgrounds. However, students do not create their Facebook profiles knowing their potential employer will see it but for other students to see.

One issue that I think should be discussed in Comm 245 is illegal downloading of music, movies, tv shows, etc. Among Cornell students, it is very frequent for students to go to DC++ to download songs they want or a new episode of some tv show they like to watch. In addition, it would be interesting in the future to talk about the growing popularity of iPhones and Blackberry and how they affect social interaction and relationships.

Article quoted: http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr00/addiction.html

12: The Decline of Anonymity

Eight years after Patricia Wallace’s book, The Psychology of the Internet, was first published, the students of COMM245 considered Wallace’s ideas as we studied the psychology of social computing throughout this semester. Since the Internet is a rapidly changing space, we found that some of Wallace’s ideas were no longer as relevant (e.g. emphasizing MUDs) and there were other Internet spaces that she did not anticipate (e.g. social networking sites). Similarly, as our use of the Internet continues to change, certain theories and phenomena we have learned about will hold true while others will need to be altered.

Anonymity, or the degree to which the space reveals participant identities, is an important dimension of various spaces on the Internet. This dimension can be influenced by visibility, audibility, and self-expression. I believe that CMC will become less and less anonymous over time. Perhaps the use of video conferencing and audio chat will become more widely utilized as CMC becomes a primary means of communication rather than a compliment or prerequisite to other mediums. I’ve recently noticed some small changes that show hints of individuals opening up online, such as adding a picture of themselves as their buddy icon. Maybe in the future it will become more acceptable to align face-to-face and CMC even more—and therefore have less emphasis on anonymity. As the Internet becomes less anonymous, various communication theories that relate to anonymity (SIDE, etc.) will need to be adapted.

Aside from how we are visibly seen and audibly heard through CMC, I believe our identities will be kept less anonymous on the Internet due to the increasing amount of information becoming available online. One of McKenna’s (2007) relationship facilitation factors referred to as “getting the goods” discusses the ability to get information about others online through areas such as Google, Facebook, etc. prior to meeting face-to-face. The more information that individuals are able to find out about others—the less control individuals will have over how they present themselves while communicating online.

Selective self-representation, an attribute of Walther’s (1996) Hyperpersonal Model entails that various spaces on the Internet allow individuals to control which of their personal characteristics are expressed to others and have the ability to emphasize their desirable characteristics while hiding others. Selective self-presentation may become less applicable in the future since we may people will be able to find out a great deal about us through the Internet. This aspect can be tied into theories relating to online attraction, digital deception, and social associations.

I believe that in the future there will be more emphasis on synchronicity online, leading individuals to be expected to interact in real time and therefore have less time to carefully craft their representations—further mimicking face-to-face interactions. I believe technology will keep changing to further replicate the face-to-face environment, eventually leading theories such as the Social Information Processing Theory to fade out, since individuals will truly be getting to know someone online in the same way as they would face-to-face.

In addition to revising theories as our use of the Internet changes, there will be new topics that will need to be addressed. As PDAs become even more widely used, I believe this technology will need to be addressed in COMM245. It would be interesting to apply the concept of Internet addiction to this area. Another important aspect to look at would be the consumption of various forms of news and information online. What sort of news or other information do individuals seek online rather than other mediums, and why? Furthermore, with the constant customization of websites to individual’s own tastes it would be interesting to look at social computing from a company’s perspective. What sort of tactics do they use to ensure that individuals will continue going back to their site?

Although I can’t be sure that any of my predictions will hold to be true in the future, I am sure of one thing—the social computing theories that I’ve learned in COMM245 will definitely change my view of my personal experiences using the Internet in the present and the future.

Extra Blog

Learning more and more about CMC communication and online interactions it is becoming more and interesting to me to see how people are using the technology we have today because it is so much more vast an area than I ever thought. This makes be a little scared for the future, however. Seeing how technology is changing and growing in leaps and bound makes me fearful of a world where face to face interactions are at a minimum and your avatar interacts with more people than you do on a daily basis.
There are many theories that we learned about in 245 that I think will hold true in the future. This is because even as CMC technology changes it will not change the way people think or interact. Human nature will not be changing any time soon. Impression management will always be applicable because people will always desire to make themselves appear the way they want to appear and make the best impression possible. In the future there will probably be even more ways to selectively self present yourself. For example, not so long ago the idea of online dating profiles and avatars were unheard of let alone common. I believe that digital deception will still be a part of CMC because it is human nature to lie and the increase in the amount of communicating we do via CMC and the inevitable new ways will only make digital deception easier to pull off.
Media richness theory I believe will also still be applicable in the future because we ill never stop wanting to find the best, most efficient, and face saving means of communicating our message. It was probable even become more and more prevalent because efficiency becomes so much more important to us it seems as we find newer more efficient medium. For example, text messaging has increased the efficiency with which I communicate so much that I feel I am even becoming spoiled, wanting even more efficient media. Maybe telepathy will go mainstream soon, who knows.
I also think that the hyperpersonal model will continue to hold true. I think that as more and more people use online communication there will be a greater likelihood in your mind that you are talking to a normal person just like you and not a pedophile or thirty year old in his parents’ basement. Not only will it be human nature to make immediate judgments, the decrease in skepticism will cause more over attribution in those judgments.
I think that the CFO theory will probably become obsolete. CFO states that CMC communication leads to poor and negative impressions because of fewer cues. However, as we use CMC more and more a new set of cues will be emerging that our generation and future generations will be able to pick up as easily and with as much accuracy as we do in FtF interactions. Even take emoticons for example. Emoticons are relatively new but are already easily recognized and universally understood.
I believe that there will be a huge increase in technology and the amount that people communicate using CMC as well as more ways in which to do so. Being in the same place at the same time will most likely become less and less necessary. Businesses will surely find ways of using technology to their advantage. For example video conferencing is just one thing that is widely used now but not so long ago seemed like something out of the Jetson’s. Education will surely find new ways to utilize technology. I for one never thought that I would be doing homework assignments and posting them on an online blog for everyone to read. This course has made me curious as to how people will continue to communicate in the future and how we will use technology to make our lives easier.

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.

12 EXTRA BLOG

During this semester in COMM 245, we have discussed numerous theories, some that I predict will hold in the future and some that I predict will change in the future. The Hyperpersonal Theory states that in CMC there is a reduction in breadth (rate a CMC partner on fewer characteristics) and an increase in intensity (more intense/exaggerated ratings of a CMC partner). In the future, people will talk more and more through CMC and become better at judging the person on the other computer. Therefore, people will not over-attribute others or give really intense ratings of a CMC partner; in the future, people will know better. Using the reasoning that people will talk more and more online and learn how to better judge a CMC partner, the Social Information Processing Theory will change as well. The Media Richness Theory states that communication media differ in the richness of the information processed, and efficiency equals the optimal match between equivocality of a communication task and the richness of the medium. I predict that the Media Richness Theory will hold true in the future and expand to new communication technologies. I predict that some theories we discussed in class will completely hold in the future. For example, the Social Distance Theory (which states that lying is uncomfortable and people use the most socially distant, or leanest, media to lie in, will remain unchanged in the future. This theory deals with human nature, and no matter what technologies are invented or what other theories are invented; this quality of people will remain unchanged and cause this theory to remain unchanged. In the future, gender signals during CMC will remain unchanged as well. Once again, these are human traits that will never change in the future. I also believe that the Caplan Model will become even more intense in the future. With new and more addicting technologies being created, people who have social problems in FtF communication will become more and more addicted to CMC with the creation of more addicting technologies.

There are a few new technologies that will need to be addressed in the future. The first one being Internet on your phone. Having Internet on your phone is like having Internet everywhere you go, and Internet on your phone is wireless. Another technology that goes along with this is instant message on your phone, such as Blackberry Messaging. I also think video-conferencing is another form of technology that needs to be addressed. For example, one of my lectures at Cornell had two professors. One of the professors lectured in the classroom, while the other one lectured through videoconferencing. He lived in New York City. Essentially, a professor who was not on the Cornell campus, but hundreds of miles away, was lecturing to the class.

COMM 245 did a wonderful job of teaching us how we communicate using different CMC technologies compared to FtF communication. The class allowed us to participate in what we were learning about by blogging online for our weekly assignments. I would have liked to learn more about the start of Internet. I also would have liked to know how the Internet has affected the economy; such as which jobs were lost because of the Internet and which jobs were gained. In conclusion, COMM 245 was a very interesting and informative class!

12 - Bloggerama

What is it that we really like about blogs? It is because we finally get that chance to be that newspaper columnist that everyone listens to for advice? On the other hand, maybe it is because we finally get a chance to share our true feelings with hopes that someone will listen. Whatever the reason, it all comes back to the fact that bloggers want to be heard. Therefore, what is the future of blogs? It’s simple, as technology grows, so will the aspects of blogs including how we express our feelings or opinions online. With more pictures and simpler ways to make blogs and change the fonts and colors, blogs will become more personalized to the writer. Just look at how our class blog has tremendously expanded throughout the course in a span of only 4 months. Can you imagine what the future holds?

As a result, this will have an immense impact on some of the aspects of the theories that hold true today. For instance, the Social Presence Theory and Reduced Social Context Theory both address that CMC predominantly causes poorly developed, impoverished and even negative impression formation. However, with increased fonts and pictures, blogs will say more about the person than ever, making the impressions less impoverished than they are now. Whether or not the impressions are negative will vary, but more clues can do as much good as bad, telling more about the person and speeding up the slower impression formation in CMC that the SIP theory states.

As a result, this class will have to start teaching new ways to evaluate and get to know people online. For example, what the font size or color says not only about their gender or age, but also about their personality. Just like how people can read body language and tell a lot about a person’s character by their handwriting, a new book of decoding will have to be written for blogs. Currently, the class teaches about how a person’s language in emails can give clues to their gender, but what will be discovered about the visual clues in blogs revealing personality clues are limitless and fascinating.

Nevertheless, the aspect of anonymity is undeniably one of the most attractive incentives of the Internet. Therefore, there will always have to be a cap as to how much a blog really will tell about a person. Things might still develop slower than they will in FtF, but the future holds cooler blogs than ever, which means we will just have to become just as cool and step up to the plate to tackle the blogs of our future.