[Air-l] CMC, ICT, digital communication

[Han N. Lee]

On 7/24/06, Irina Shklovski <irinas+ at cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
> ... 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.

Well, face-to-face communication IS also mediated through our voice,
body, language, etc., but I guess people use in conventional way the
phrase "mediated communication" as the all sorts of communication but
face-to-face one.

I've not been a fan of this particular distinction between mediated
and f2f because the phrase "face-to-face communication" seems to
presuppose that there are individuals (at least two or more) as
separate entities first and then they engage in communication... sort
of like James W Carey's critic of the transmission model of
communication; because it seems to privilege enable-bodied Western
beings (e.g., how do the deaf, the blind, or Islamic women with their
face covered with a veil engage in face-to-face communication without
seeing each other, without showing their face to each other, etc.?);
and because it seems to place us back to real/virtual, offline/online,
authentic/secondary, physical/digital, or all sorts of misleading
dichotomies that other scholars have already critiqued.

Anyway, whatever term/phrase we choose to apply for our research...
leaves out something. I think it's more useful being reflexive about
how terms shape our research, how they operate in
participant/author/reader relations evolving around research, etc.
than thinking of what is UNIVERSALLY the right term. Our participants'
experience is too complicated to be neatly categorized into the labels
we cling onto and force to them.

Cheers,

Han

-- 
Han N. Lee, Ph.D. Student
Department of Communication, Machmer Hall
University of Massachusetts
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Amherst, MA 01003-9278

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