Mass Interaction, Information Overload and Computer Mediated Communication Tools

The large-scale adoption of computer mediated communication technologies has resulted in what has been described as “mass interaction”, shared discourse between hundreds, thousands or more individuals. The emergence of mass interaction presents new opportunities to learn about and understand human communication, and information technologies. A number of theoretical papers suggest that the forms that mass interaction takes, can, partly be understood in terms of resource constraints. In particular, it has been suggested that user information overload results in non-linear feedback loops which impacts on discourse structure. Further, that the nature of these feedback loops is related to technology type. This paper describes an empirical examination of three hypothesized effects of such loops by the analysis of 2.65 million USENET messages posted to 600 newsgroups over a 6-month period. This represents the first empirical exploration of the impact of systems effects on Usenet discourse. The paper then examines the relationship between the hypothesized non-linear feedback loops and technology type by comparing the Usenet data with that of 478,240 email messages sent to 487 email lists managed by Listserv software over a 5-month period. Statistical analysis of the Usenet data demonstrated the existence of the hypothesized effects and support the assertion that individual ‘information overload’ coping strategies have an observable impact on mass interaction discourse dynamics. Comparative analysis of the email and Usenet data demonstrated the relationship between discourse dynamics and technology type. This in turn suggests that the usability of computer mediated communication technologies can be examined in group-level terms.