ABSTRACT

In this module, you will be introduced to a brief

historical development of Computer-Mediated
Communication. Moreover, the approaches for
classifying computer-mediated communication are also
discussed in this module. This module ends with a
discussion of the current state of research in the field of
Computer-Mediated Communication.

MODULE 2
History, General Overview and
Current State of CMC
 Module 2
History, General Overview and Current State of CMC

It is expected that at the end of this module, you will be able to:
a) Summarize the historical development of computer-mediated communication.
b) Classify computer-mediated communication along various dimensions.
c) Describe the current state of CMC as an area of study and research.

As this course aims to analyze the pragma-linguistic and sociolinguistic dimensions of various texts produced
through information and communication technology, it is necessary to devote a module to a general overview of
the history of computer-mediated communication and the approaches in classifying its forms.
I. Brief History of Computer-Mediated Communication
The origins of new technologies often turn out to be more prosaic than popular imaginings. We understandably
assume that Alexander Graham Bell’s famous 1876 call to his assistant, ‘‘Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!’’
signaled the scientific triumph of conveying the first voice message across a telephone line. In actuality, Bell
summoned Thomas Watson from the next room because he, Bell, clumsy as usual, had spilled sulfuric acid on
himself and needed help cleaning up.
The first email message was equally mundane. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson (a computer engineer working at Bolt
Beranek and Newman) sent an arbitrary string of letters between two minicomputers that, although networked
through a precursor of the Internet, were actually sitting in the same room. This first email was hardly an exercise
in interpersonal communication. It did, however, engender a convention that helped define the way all email
henceforth would be sent. To clarify the recipient and machine location to which a message was addressed,
Tomlinson selected the @ symbol, which separated a user’s login name from the name of his or her computer.
Today, we are all too familiar with the format of email addresses such as jcaesar@rubicon.mil.
Telephones and email are just two of the technologies for communicating information across distances. Since
the human voice can reach only so far, societies have long used smoke signals or drum beats to convey messages
to those outside of earshot. Semaphores and the telegraph were more sophisticated technologies for accomplishing
the same goal. With the development of computers, written messages could be transmitted only if there were a
system for linking machines together. Therefore, our story of computer-mediated communication (CMC) begins
with a brief look at the networking systems that made CMC possible.
The earliest computer networks were created by the U.S. military for sharing numerical data between research
sites. Over time, the same binary coding system developed for sending numbers was used for transmitting language.
ARPANET (the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was built between
1968 and 1969, under a contract with Bolt Beranek and Newman.
Civilians began joining the networking community in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Homegrown bulletin
board systems (BBSs), carried over telephone dial-up lines, connected clusters of friends and helped create the
earliest online social communities. While the best known of these groups was the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic
Link), the number of online communities quickly mushroomed. Computer scientists were not far behind in creating
networking systems that were independent of the military-based ARPANET. In 1979/80, USENET (UNIX Users
Network) was developed at the University of North Carolina as a kind of ‘‘poor man’s ARPANET.’’ An important
function of USENET was to carry distributed online forums known as newsgroups.
Enter the Internet in 1983. Over time, through a few twists and turns, the old ARPANET became the Internet,
which was a federally funded project linking multiple computer networks through a specific type of communication
protocol known as TCP/IP. The infant Internet was a potentially dynamic tool but not one easily harnessed. In the
early 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee designed the World Wide Web, essentially a collection of software tools and
protocols that make it relatively easy for computers to communicate across the Internet. A number of earlier
functions (such as email) were ported to the web, making the exchange of information incredibly smoother.
The most important step toward user-friendliness was the emergence of tools for searching the web. Having
thousands of web pages out in cyberspace was of little tangible value if you didn’t know where to find them. The
1990s saw the rapid appearance of a succession of search tools, most of which were free to end-users. Gopher (also
the name of the University of Minnesota’s mascot) was designed in the early 1990s for locating documents on the
Internet. In 1993, Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois created the web browser Mosaic, the commercial
version of which, Netscape, appeared in 1994. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer followed in July 1995. In September
1998, Google made its debut. By March 2007, roughly 3.8 billion Google searches were being done in the United
States per month. All these networking (and search) tools provide infrastructure for transmitting written language
online.
II. Classificatory Approaches to CMC
The analysis of the growing variety of CMC texts has led to a number of different classificatory approaches.

A. Type of Participant Involvement

Grzenia (2006) suggests the most basic description into four categories depending on the type of
involvement of the human and non-human participants, i.e., the computer.
1. person to person (e.g. chat, email)
2. person to computer (e.g., online games)
3. computer to person (e.g., various communiqués concerning the system updates of programs, online
questionnaires),
4. computer to computer (sending or exchanging internal electronic data).
In the subsequent discussions in this course, the primary focus is the first option, the person to person, as
this is the one where the individuality of the users, and notably their gender, age or nationality will leave a mark on
the actual text produced by them, unlike a formalized code-like communication between, e.g., two computers.
B. Two Modes Based on Synchronicity
Another important distinction relates to synchronicity of participation (Kiesler et al. 1984)
1. Synchronous: a mode that requires that both sender and addressee(s) be logged-on
simultaneously (e.g. chat, MUDs and MOOs).
2. Asynchronous: a mode that does not require that users be logged-on at the same time (e.g. e-
mail, usenet newsgroups, listserv discussion lists, etc.).

C. Audience Scope
A third way to classify computer-mediated communication is by considering the the scope
of the intended audience.
1. One-to-one: the message is intended for a single person
2. One-to-many: the message is intended for a larger audience
Here’s the tabular summary of the classificatory schemes:

asynchronous synchronous
one-to-one email, texting on mobile instant messaging
phones
one-to-many newsgroups, listservs, blogs, computer conferencing,
MySpace, Facebook, MUDs, MOOs, chat, Second
YouTube Life

III. Current State of Computer-Mediated Communication

Computer-mediated language research represents a new and dynamically evolving field. Although a
few pioneering studies were published in the 1980s, linguistic study of computer-mediated communication
(CMC) began attracting serious attention only about 20 years ago, with a classification question that is now
regarded as overly simplistic: Is CMC more like speech or writing? Those early days were also
characterized by a fascination with superficial structural features, such as acronyms, abbreviations, and
emoticons, that purportedly characterized CMC and, therefore, is a part of the discussions in this course.
Since then, however, the field – if an area of study that is still so new can be described as such – has grown
dramatically.

The early research mentioned above was followed in the 1990s by contextualized discourse studies of
language use in online textual environments such as mailing lists, newsgroups, and chat rooms. Politeness
(or the lack thereof) in the former was one of the first topics to attract attention, along with gender
differences in politeness behaviors. Chat rooms raised issues about how interaction (turn-taking, topical
coherence, etc.) was managed in computer-mediated environments. In the latter connection, it was
observed that the textual record left by CMC allows communicators to engage in multiple simultaneous
threads of conversation, as well as giving rise to a meta-awareness that fosters language play.

Research addressing sociolinguistic concerns started to appear in the mid-1990s. Some of the earliest
studies examined language choice and code switching; this was later followed by studies of variation in
usage – especially of typography and orthography – according to participants’ status, regional dialect,
gender, and CMC mode. Meanwhile, interest in classifying CMC as a whole was, for the most part,
abandoned in favor of classification of modes or genres of CMC, on one hand (Herring, 2002), and
classification approaches that cross-cut modes based on scalar dimensions or facets, on the other – the
latter often inspired by earlier work on speech and writing.

More recently, CMC scholars and linguists have also investigated the pragmatic dimension of
computer-mediated communication focusing on three kinds of phenomena: 1) classical core pragmatic
phenomena (e.g., implicature, presupposition, relevance, speech acts, politeness) in CMC, 2) CMC-
specific phenomena (e.g., emoticons, nicknames, “Netspeak”), and 3) CMC genres or modes (blogs, SMS,
wikis, chat, etc.).

As regards language, the vast majority of language-oriented CMC research had as its subject matter
English-language CMC – a reflection, in part, of the origins of the Internet in the United States. This, too,
has been changing, especially as regards discourse analysis and sociolinguistic research, in accordance
with the rapid diffusion of the Internet to other countries starting in the mid-1990s. Native-language
traditions of research into computer-mediated language have now become established in Germany, France,
 and the Nordic countries, and are starting to emerge in Japan, China, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Cross-
linguistic research has identified both similarities and cultural specificities as regards language use online.
However, this course will be focused on English-language CMC as your program deems appropriate and
necessary.

IV. Terminological Issues and Questions

A. Nomenclature of the emergent field

In the 1990s, computer-mediated communication (CMC) became widely known, a usage which was
much reinforced when it appeared in the title of an influential online publication, the Journal of Computer-
Mediated Communication. However, in the face of so many apparently new developments, one might
question whether the term “computer-mediated communication” is still appropriate to characterize the
overall scope of the phenomenon.

1. Technological perspective
Communication technologies are increasingly moving beyond computers. The emergence of
mobile technology complicates the notion of ‘mediation by computer’. People do not really feel
they are holding a computer up to their ear when they talk on their cellphone, notwithstanding
the fact that a great deal of computational processing is involved in making the arrangement
work. And the unease was increased by the proliferation of interactive speech devices. Many
people have thus begun to use the more inclusive names electronically mediated communication
(EMC) or digitally mediated communication (DMC).

2. Linguistic Perspective
From a linguistic viewpoint, the term computer-mediated communication is too broad. Crystal
(2011) points out that the terms language and communication are not synonymous. He argues
that the latter includes all forms of communication, such as music, photographs, line-drawings,
and video, as well as language in the strict sense of the word. He suggested that Internet
linguistics the most convenient name for the scientific study of all manifestations of language
in the electronic medium. Some recent language-focused publications use alternatives such as
“digital media” and “new media” language. However, the term “new media” is lacking in
historical perspective, and “digital media” is too broad, referring as it does to video games as
well as communication devices. Herring (2001) prefers the term computer-mediated discourse
to refer specifically to the study of language and language use in computer-mediated
communication.

It well may be that in the coming years, the dust will settle and a descriptive term that is neither too
narrow nor too broad will emerge as the obvious candidate. For now, CMC still seems a useful term, in that
it is based on established tradition and remains the term preferred among communication scholars.

B. Classification of the Internet mediums

What to call collectively the various entities which form Internet discourse such as Email, blogs, chats, and
tweets. In its early phases, when CMC was more limited in its scope and hence more uniform, they are often
described as genres. Yet, genre suggests a homogeneity which has not yet been established. Linguists have to
demonstrate linguistic coherence, not assume it. At present, when the use of electronic devices in the process of
communication has grown rapidly and beyond measure, it seems virtually impossible to assign one set of features
to this variety of language. This leads to another question, whether computer-mediated language should be called
varieties or dialects or registers or any of the other terms for situationally related uses of language provided by
sociolinguistics and stylistics. Ultimately, it is important to indicate that the Computer-Mediated Communication
has not received a final classification in terms of its linguistic features.
As Grzenia (2006) stresses, CMC is primarily an interactive type of communication, and as such it changes
dynamically depending on the users, its purpose and the medium. The medium allows for a discussion of an
unlimited variety of topics, has its unique aspects as a mode and its categories and classification, as discussed above,
may in fact depend quite a lot on the relationship between the interactants. Hence the possible differences to be
found in the language of, e.g., chat as opposed to a business email, as it is rather likely that chat will be used by
close friends, and very seldom by the superior and the subordinate, whereas a business email will require a much
more formal and official kind of language than, e.g., an email to a close friend. It is therefore obvious that, in view
of the resultant variety and fluctuation of CMC language use, the description of CMC language will need to take a
wide range of options into account. And this is the main focus of this course.

Questions

Directions: Read the questions carefully and provide concise answers.

1. What was the role played by the US defense sector in the invention of the Internet?
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
2. What was the role played by US universities in the exploration of the World Wide Web?
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
3. From which perspective, technological and linguistic, is the question of naming the new field more
difficult to answer? Support your answer.
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
4. Which is the harder problem, the appropriate nomenclature for the new field or the appropriate
classification of the language used in the various Internet situations such as Email and Chat? Why?
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________