Sup y'all. My name is Rich Rothman. I'm a junior ECE (electrical and computer engineering) from Long Island. I enjoy hard rock/death metal music, bowling, Stephen King books, and some other junk.
I wonder how long most of my fellow bloggers took to make their post? It's our first foray into this environment, and our first interaction with the majority of the class. I wonder if anyone out there took painstaking efforts to choose every word perfectly to portray themselves in the coolest/most intelligent light? Perhaps other online spaces such as facebook warrant this kind of attention? Anyway, onto the metaspaces.
I've taken part in many different metaspaces and had various experiences. One topic that I've been interested in for many years now is how AIM and similar chat programs have changed the communication preferences and abilities of the newer generations.
These synchronous chats have had many profound effects. It is much easier to stay in contact with people who you don't regularly interact with, such as camp/summer friends or relatives. The difference in effort and commitment between phoning a friend or double clicking on their screen name is very notable. It is also easier to have very regular, probably daily, conversations with close friends. Having a two hour conversation with one of your friends everyday for a month sounds very daunting, but it becomes much less stressful when you can read your email, talk to other friends, or just casually check the conversation every few minutes. Having a two hour phone conversation with a friend everyday for a month sounds a little unreasonable.
But what negative effects are there? I believe that newer generations are relying too much on communication which is not in person, or completely synchronous. Talking to someone face to face, or at least on the phone, forces one to focus on the conversation fully. AIM users commonly talk to several people at once, or just wander away from the computer, and nobody thinks anything of it. This also suggests the question, is talking on AIM truly synchronous, when the conversationalists constantly switch between multiple messages and multitask, shifting their focus away?
It is also much easier to say uncomfortable or embarassing things through your fingers and a screen, than to someone's face. One doesn't have to see the other person's expressions or reactions. To the same effect, the person in this situation who is hearing the uncomfortable statement does not have to hide his reaction or put up a false front, but simply type a statement that will fool the other.
Without being able to see facial cues or hear verbal reactions, much of the communication process that has been developed by our evolution as humans and linguists is being bypassed.
3 comments:
Sup Rich, I share your interest in the effects of instant messaging on the communication preferences of younger generations. Even though there are negative aspects of computer mediated communication, which your post does an excellent job of enumerating, I believe that you overlooked an important positive property of instant messaging, cognitive reallocation. This is the idea that because you don't have to spend mental resources on physical presentation (posture, facial expression, eye contact) you can divert those resources to enhancing the quality of your communication. If you've ever had a really intense conversation via instant messaging, you can appreciate how useful those extra resources can be in choosing just the right response to an in depth question. Perhaps instead of bypassing the communications process developed through evolution, instant messaging is just the next step in the evolution of that process.
Hey Rich, I think you bring up a good point when you ask if conversations on AIM are truly synchronous. A conversation on AIM can switch between synchronous and asynchronous even during a conversation.
The thing to keep in mind is that in addition to allowing a person to hide their facial expressions and what else they are doing while messaging, AIM also allows a person to think about what they are going to say before they say it and correct what they are going to say before they send it. The person on the other end has no knowledge that the messages are being carefully planned.
Another issue that I think is interesting is that you never know for sure who you are talking to on the other end. You assume that is the person on your buddylist but for all you know somebody else could be sitting at the computer and unless your buddy has a unique writing style, it can be hard to figure this out.
Although there are always some issues with trusting what is being said on AIM, I would consider it a valuable tool. Nice post Rich.
I think that AIM conversations are actually less synchronous than a phone conversation. When someone is on the computer, more often than not they are multitasking. A lot of the time people aren't paying attention to the conversation because they are doing other things. I find these delays to be extremely awkward and i think they detract from the conversation. When i have something important to say to someone i always call them or talk to them in person. As instant as AIM appears to be, there is still a decent amount of sensory lag in reading what people type. With the addition of all the extra distractions that come with a computer i really cant consider AIM to be truly synchronous. The familiar aspect of someone's voice over the phone adds a special something that an online conservation cant duplicate. The human aspect of a face to face or phone conversation seems to do a better job of keeping peoples attention focused.
Erc
Post a Comment