Browse Books

Reviewer: Charlene A. Dykman

Hiltz and Turoff have produced a new edition of their 1978 book by the same name [1]. This edition is essentially the same as the first edition with some notable additions. It includes a new preface and an important new final chapter about “superconnectivity” as well as an updated bibliography. In the first edition, Hiltz and Turoff predicted that computer conferencing would be in wide use by the mid-1990s. They saw it as a viable alternative for communication among groups or networks of people or organizations. The authors predicted that computer-mediated communication (CMC) would be as ubiquitous as the telephone and would obviate the need to be in dense urban areas in order to have inexpensive communication ties. The first computer conferencing system was created in 1970. Each chapter of the first edition began with a fictitious issue of the Boswash Times, a computerized news service of the “BostonWashington” megalopolis. The authors concluded their preface to the first edition with the following: For now, imagine that it is breakfast time in 1994, and you have settled down to a cup of coffee substitute heated in your solar stove, to read your computer-generated equivalent of the daily newspaper, including all the news that is fit to display on your home terminal. In the preface to this 1993 edition, the authors begin with an admission that they greatly underestimated the time that it would take for this technology to become truly pervasive. According to Hiltz and Turoff, it has taken longer because the use of the technology requires social reengineering and must confront social inertia. For instance, females participate more fully in computer conferencing than in face-to-face meetings. That may be seen as a threat to those in power and authority at all levels of organizations and society and hinder the spread of the technology. Additionally, people still want to rely on the work methods that brought them their success. Computer-mediated communication systems have experienced creeping evolutionary adoption, mostly from the bottom up in an organization. The process often begins with the technical people using such a system. Electronic mail is the most common type of CMC. The authors now predict that such systems will be prevalent in another 20 or 30 years. Hiltz and Turoff have added a final chapter called “Superconnectivity: Computers, Communication, and Social Organization,” which begins with a summary of recently developed capabilities such as groupware and hypertext. Short case studies present CMC systems such as one used at IBM; this case study discusses the ways this CMC system changed the traditionally hierarchical structure at IBM. Several pages are devoted to the use of CMC systems for collaborative learning, including a summary of research into the student mastery of subjects in traditional classroom settings versus what the authors call the “Virtual Classroom.” This section is particularly interesting and rich with references for readers to continue their exploration of distance learning. Hiltz and Turoff discuss social and political uses of CMC systems and describe the intense use of such systems during the Gulf War and the Tiananmen Square uprising. In the former, individual-to-individual communication bypassed the “official” news derived from Pentagon or White House briefings. In the latter, people were able to communicate in spite of the politically mandated news blackouts. The use of these systems for political organizing at the grass roots level is outlined. The authors summarize a public electronic network in Santa Monica, California, that is used to debate public and governmental policy issues. Hiltz and Turoff offer some concerns about such systems and their impact on the “representative” style of democracy that we have in the US. They raise concerns that a CMC must be able to support the concept of roles because individuals in group processes are not truly equal. They conclude with a set of ethical and legal concerns such as intellectual property rights issues, ownership, and eavesdropping. Overall, this book is fascinating. The body of it thoroughly details, complete with exact text from conferencing sessions, a lengthy longitudinal collaboration over great distances through a CMC in use in the late 1970s. It is fascinating to read the text of disagreements, arguments, decision making, and petty rivalries. The new edition has some minor but important additions. This edition will be particularly useful to researchers in this field because of its extensive bibliography.