Slouching Toward the Ordinary: Current Trends in Computer-Mediated Communication

INTRODUCTION It has become a truism that computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems, as compared with previous communication technologies, are cheap, fast, and democratic; as such, their popularity continues to grow. Every year, it seems, a new type of CMC enters the scene: ICQ (‘I Seek You’), instant messaging (IM), short-messaging service (SMS, also known as text messaging or ‘texting’), web logs (blogs). How has CMC technology changed, conceptually and feature-wise, from previous technologies? More importantly, is new CMC technology giving rise to new social practices, and if so, in what directions is it steering us? These questions, which regularly frame inquiry into the design and use of CMC systems, reflect two underlying assumptions: first, that ‘new’ CMC technologies really are new; and second, that CMC technologies shape communication, and through it, social behavior. The first of these assumptions is rarely challenged, other than by historians who note parallels between the internet and previous teletechnologies such as the telegraph and telephone (Baron, 2000). After all, who could deny that the social hypertext of the world wide web (Erickson, 1996), for example, constituted a radical departure from what came before? The second assumption, technological determinism (Markus, 1994), was vigorously critiqued in the early to mid-1990s (Spears and Lea, 1992; Walther, 1996), but has been making a quiet comeback as a result of a growing body of empirical evidence that the medium can shape the message, or at least, how the message is packaged and processed (Condon and Čech, 2001). Now, the new media & society