[Air-l] CMC, ICT, digital communication

[Ledbetter, Andrew Michael]

I've struggled with the term "CMC" in my own writing. While I wouldn't agree that the term is "archaic" (as many scholars still use the term frequently), it does "feel" dated to me. Of course, that may just be my own subjective feeling. But, in my own writing, I have tried to refer to specific media as much as possible (e-mail, IM, chat, Facebook, etc.) rather than using the term "CMC"... which might be a healthy move on the whole, since we know that there are significant qualitative and quantitative differences in communication across those media, despite their common online nature.
 
Yet, simultaneously, people sometimes seem to think about, and socially construct, online communication channels as a unified whole. Thus, it seems reasonable that we have an umbrella term to refer to such media. Recently, I have tended to use "online communication"---it is less verbose than "computer-mediated communication", seems less intrusive than an acronym, and seems broad enough to include a lot of different technologies (e.g., both Internet and non-Internet interaction, etc.). In short, it seems to get the job done all right, though I'm sure the term has shortcomings too. But of course, I'm sure appropriate terminology varies from discipline to discipline.
 
Andrew M. Ledbetter
Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant
Department of Communication Studies
University of Kansas 

________________________________

From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org on behalf of Mark Bell
Sent: Mon 7/24/2006 11:00 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] CMC, ICT, digital communication



Folks,

As far as I have been told, CMC is an outdated term. One professor told me
it was archaic and vague - asking if we should also refer to "pen mediated
communication". There certainly is a lot of research into how we communicate
in the digital, multi-channel, immersive environment, so we should have a
unifying term.

It sounds like we need a new term but I agree digital communication and ICT
are far too broad. The work I am doing with Wikipedia is definitely
stigmergic in nature (or at least I hope to prove it is) but that is very
different from IM or email.

M