[Air-l] CMC, ICT, digital communication

[Sarah Stein]

To join in the discussion in regard to f2f vs, "mediated" 
communication: John Peters has a discussion in his excellent book, 
Speaking into the Air, about f2f communication being privileged since 
John Dewey as the one assured of the communication circle being 
completed: message(s) constructed and received with their intended 
meanings fully intact. He uses the parable of Jesus sowing seeds on 
rocky ground to argue that mass communications' broadcasting of its 
messages is actually more likely to connect just by numbers, and that 
the idea that people talking one on one to each other (or in an 
approximation of that configuration) necessarily means they 
understand each other is often far from the case.
	I always found that helpful to keep in mind--and, what's more, amusing.
	Sarah

Sarah Stein, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Dept of Communication
Chair, Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable (TLTR)
Box 8104,  N.C. State University     
Raleigh, NC 27695-8104
Ph: 919-515-9740; Fax 919-515-9456

>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
>240 Hicks Way
>Amherst, MA 01003-9278
>
>Curriculum Project Assistant
>Commonwealth College
>408 Goodell Building
>140 Hicks Way
>Amherst, MA 01003-9272
>vm: 413) 577-0729
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-- 
Sarah Stein, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Dept of Communication
Chair, Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable (TLTR)
Box 8104,  N.C. State University     
Raleigh, NC 27695-8104
Ph: 919-515-9740; Fax 919-515-9456