Passive and active mediation: can conciliation inform CMC research?

There is a body of evidence to suggest that CMC has a distorting effect on the social information used in creating and maintaining relationships. Existing research has tended to identify variables for analysis and used these to infer a general effect of CMC on the majority of relationships. Given the complexity of human interaction, a more relationship-specific approach to the identification of salient variables may be desirable. Conciliation is one such approach: a conciliator must isolate salient factors of a relationship and distort these to transform the relationship that exists between parties. This paper proposes the exploration of the relationship between ‘active’ (human) mediation and ‘passive’ (technological) mediation, as a way of informing CMC research. A Model of Relational Communication is proposed, which enables the scope of existing theories of mediation to be evaluated and allows active and passive mediation to be discussed in similar terms. Provisional pilot results indicate that passive mediation impacts on active mediation, and imply that a study of conciliation may inform research into CMC.