[Air-l] CMC, ICT, digital communication

[Irina Shklovski]

I guess it depends on whether we are trying to focus on communication 
specifically, or on technology use in general? ICT (or information and 
communication technologies) sort of becomes an umbrella term for all 
things that allow us to communicate and access information - very useful 
when talking about phones, internet and everything in between. Yet if we 
are talking specifically about communication between people, information 
access becomes a tricky thing to explain - does googling for information 
about a car or the location of a restaurant on a computer or a cell 
phone qualify? Lately, I've been using simply "mediated communication" 
as an umbrella term, I guess because it gets away from words like 
"online" - which to me seems to signify a computer and rules out a 
regular landline phone, or "networked" - which to me seems to be an even 
more ambiguous and relatively overused term. Maybe "mediated 
communication" is a bit too broad, but I've been using it to define any 
kind of communication between people that is not face-to-face 
communication - i.e. mediated by some medium.

Irina

Mark Bell wrote:
> Folks,
>
>
> I agree with the need for an umbrella term. I am not sure I like "online
> communication" for the reason "online" is a vague word. Does "online" mean
> on the "Internet", or a LAN's or both? You could say "online" meant plugged
> into a digital network, then why not say that?
>
> What about "Digital Networked Communication"?
>
> Mark
>
>
>   

-- 

I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
				Nostalgia, by Billy Collins