[Air-L] comments on Chat as a technically mediated social system

Murray Turoff murray.turoff at gmail.com
Fri Jan 9 15:34:55 PST 2009


The problem with chat is that it will change faster than we will be
able to evolve theories for it.  Those using party-line telephones had
audio chat groups made up of the people connected through the
party-line.  Teletype operators had protocols to form instant chat
groups using Morse code.

Any early time sharing computer that allowed the operator to type on
to a users terminal had the software features that usually allowed a
simple chat capability.  We had it on EMARSI on the UNIVAC 1108 in
1971 and it was called party-line and appeared as part of a larger
system in a conference paper in the 1972 proceedings of the
International Conference on Computer Communications.  We could set the
number of lines allowed in that early version.  Today multi-line chat
is on skype and gmail by not returning the carriage so even the one
line chat is out of date.  In 1973 there was also a multi-person chat
on Plato the large Computer Assisted Instruction System at the
University of Illinois.  Chat to those of us evolving the technology
was more of an obvious thing, easy to do, that we did not write much
about it.   In 1973 the people at arpa did not wnat to release the
data on message use of the arpa net because it was the biggest
application and that was not what they had designed arpa net for.
They were afraid it might negatively affect congressional
appropriations    Why use a very expensive computer network for
communications when there was 10 cent telephone calls.  That was one
reason I wrote the paper below which show that 5-9 people groups could
commuicate more for less money using things like computerized
conferencing rather than phone calls.   That same cost benefit
calculation was repeated in chapter 14 of the network nation.

Many chats now allow you to save the proceedings, which means the
addition of a persistent memory (writing on stone rather than sand)
that makes a significant change in the way it is used especially to
accomplish true collaborative tasks like making a joint decision.

Chat will not be like current capabilities in the next decade as the
next big step will be shared blackboards where anyone can type or draw
anywhere on the board or add an audio icon that contains a short audio
recording so the concept of chat will be text, drawing, handwriting,
and voice in one system.  Users will evolve methods to use it by
imposing structures or communication protocols on the process.  In
fact it will be quite common to paste audio in word documents to
explain figures using audio which will translate to common use in all
sorts of electronic documents.   This creates problems for theories
dealing with a transient technology.  Adaptive structurization is one
theory that has a lot of merit here.  That is a description of what
social systems do to a technology in order to make real use of it.

reference: Turoff, Murray, (1972), Party-Line and Discussion:
Computerized Conferencing Systems, Proceedings of the First
International Conference on Computers and Communications, October,
IEEE. Washington DC



> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 15:33:40 +0100
> From: Jesper T?kke <ses at post10.tele.dk>
> Subject: [Air-L] Chat as a technically mediated social system
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Message-ID: <20090109143339.DMCU28218.fep50.mail.dk at post.tele.dk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> I have published a paper in the series of papers from the Centre for
> Internet Research here in Denmark. You can go direct to it following this
> link: http://www.cfi.au.dk/publikationer/cfi/011_taekke
>
> Abstract
> This paper provides an analysis of chat as a technical media for
> communication.
>
> This is realized using the strategy for analyzing that I have called
> Media
>
> Sociography (T?kke 2006). The Media Sociography is a synthesis of Medium
>
> Theory and the Systems Theoretical Sociology of Niklas Luhmann. The aim
> of
>
> the paper is to describe social reproduction under the constraints of
> chat, but
>
> also to show that Media Sociography can provide a unified theoretical
> framework
>
> for CMC-studies. The paper is also indented to provide an introduction to
>
> the Media Sociography for an English speaking public.
>
> Keywords: Chat, Medium Theory, Systems Theoretical Sociology, Computer
>
> Mediated Communication, Media Sociography.
>
> Best Regards
>
> Jesper
>
>
> cand.mag, ph.d. Jesper Taekke
> Dep. for Information- and Media Studies
> Aarhus University, Denmark
> http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/
-- 
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Information Systems, NJIT
homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff



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