Personally, I barely go through a day without using Internet. I have to check e-mails at least a couple of times a day, homework and studying materials are uploaded in blackboard, and talking to friends now mostly takes place on a messenger program. As time goes by, I find more social activities are being practiced online or at least becoming available online as well as offline.
A rapid increase in use of Internet is changing the expectation and perception of online social
computing. At the early stage of Internet, Cues Filtered Out Perspective assumed CMC would only be able to provide a few cues that will lead to develop impoverished relationship. However, as rapid development in technology brings more features to the Internet, this theory would not be valid any more. Although, at first, all human interactions in CMC were only text-based, these days, all of text, audio and visual aspects of human interaction can be provided in CMC. Therefore, CMC does not necessarily lead to decreased social presence unless it is specifically chosen to have certain feature only.
However, there are some theories that will always hold even in the future. Over-attribution processes and selective self-presentation factors in Hyperpersonal Model are examples of this case. Over-attribution processes say that fewer cues can lead a person to develop an intense impression of his partner in both positive and negative ways depends on the initial impression. Selective self-presentation says people selectively present themselves online, so that their partners would perceive them in the way they want to be perceived. This tendency would always hold and may be even intensified in the future of CMC social computing because more development on technology would offer more options for people to choose in their presentation online. According to the image they want to create, they can choose the most appropriate tool to have more effective selective self-presentation. As it becomes more successful to present a person in a desired way, it would be more susceptible for other people to believe in the image and to develop more intense impression.
As more online social interactions are expected, balancing between CMC and FtF interactions would be needed to be addressed. Already, there have been cases of people having troubles with compulsive Internet use. Some cases even led to murders and suicides. In the future, conducting various experiments on identifying the causes and impacts of problematic Internet use would make it possible to develop theories that explain the phenomena more specifically. This would help people to balance between CMC and FtF social activities. For example, it is hard to find the appropriate laws that promote healthy use of Internet. Enforcement of these laws made based on the findings from the experiments and theories would be one of the ways to have less unfortunate happenings online. It would be also educational to discuss about various features of Internet that are addictive and suggestions to overcome this addictive use of the Internet in the class.
1 comment:
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