CMC stands for computer mediated communication. It has become a very wide area of communication study today. Computer mediated communication, is communicating via computers, phones, networks of all kinds. It is the new trend of human communication, using technologies.
Computer mediated communication can be divided in two parts, synchroneous and asynchroneous, the two main CMC devices are E-mail and instant messaging. E -mail is an example of asynchroneous communication because the communicators may not be connected at the same time. On the other hand instant messaging like MSN, Facebook chat etc... is what we call synchroneous communication, because the interlocutors are both connected and chatting with each other at the same time. An other aspect that is important and separates those two types of CMC is recordability. As instant messaging is more sychroneous than email, it has much less recordability. By this I mean that when an e mail is sent it is saved for good on your computer, whereas instant messaging is most of the time lost once the discussion window is closed. Those aspects are important because they affect the way we communicate and with who. CMC represents today a huge part of Human communication since distance communication technologies have become essential in people's everyday life. This is important because, the fact that we communicate in a new way affects evidently our behaviors, our manners, our habits but more than everything our relationships with others. CMC is nothing like face to face communication, CMC offers possibilities that modify entirely the nature of communication, for example anonymity. In CMC you can chat with someone without having to reveal you identity, you can express yourself with complete dishinibition. This is extremely important because since we communicate through CMC all the time, we make choices and we discuss important issues through CMC, and we might not talk or answer the same way in a face to face context. I think that on the long run, CMC will affect human behavior in ways that we can't entirely concieve today.
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I agree with you that CMC is different from face to face communication. I think that since anonymity is most of the time guaranteed on the web, people's best and worst attributes come out using this medium.
RépondreSupprimerI think that the difference between sych CMC and asych CMC isn't in recordabilty but in perceived recordabilty. As there is nothing stopping one of the participants of a chat to have a chat-log saved or to manually cut and paste the chat.
RépondreSupprimerI like how you pointed out that CMC enables us to remain anonymous, and in turn, express ourselves in a way we wouldn't normally. And agree with Maribell also, that can definitely be one of two things: really great, or really horrible. haha..
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