Thursday, 20 September 2012

Week 9 - Conversation analysis

I remember as a teenager wanting a new cellphone every time a new and more advanced one became available. My first phone was a flip phone, and at the time I thought I was the coolest kid on the block. I even decorated it with shiny rhinestones. After losing this phone, I got a slide phone with a touchscreen AND a camera built right in to the phone! Then came the smartphones. I can now check my email, update my status on Facebook, and instant message with my friends half way across the globe. Technology has advanced and in turn our modes of communication and the discourse that we use have changed with these advances. This new technology provided a new means of communication and conversation. Computer mediated communication is something that my generation has grown up with. First it was the email, a disembedded interaction lifted out of space and time. Now we have smartphones which have allowed computer mediated communication to dominate a large percentile of social interactions by re-embedding disembedded interactions. This means that interactions such as email, that were once only considered as online conversations, can now be considered to have time and space because most people have smartphones that allow them to reply instantly from anywhere. This being said, email is still considered to be an asynchronic interaction in that it is not live in the same way that a chatroom or instant message is.

There have been many trends in the past decade in computer mediated communication that allow people to interact both live simultaneously, asynchronically, anonymously or with an identity. There is an increasinging amount of information that people put on social mediated websites such as Facebook and Twitter about their identities or anonymity. Without even knowing someone, a lot can be discovered about a person through their comments, photos, and posts. The risks associated with attaching ones name to their online identity are very vast and exceed most peoples expectations. "When using the internet technology socially online for friendship or relationships there is an element of risk. People tend to lie and present false identities online, more so than face-to-face interaction, and deception can be hard to detect when it is computer mediated. A degree of disinhibition online that is associated with diminished feedback appears to contribute to deceptive or harmful behaviors" (Goh et al., 2011). Because people's names are not necessarily attributed to their true identities, they are more inclined to diminish others or act in extremist ways when online.
 
The question is, what sort of computer mediated interaction will be the next big craze? Surely Facebook is only the beginning of communication in virtual space and time.      

Ttyl :)


Reference

Goh, L. Y. Q., Phillips, J.G., and Blaszcynski, A. 2011. "Computer-mediated communication and risk-taking behavior." Computers in Human Behavior. vol. 27, no. 5: pp. 1794-1799.


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1 comment:

  1. Unknown18 October 2012 at 03:47

    I found this week’s reading (and your post on the subject) very interesting. Like you mentioned growing up in a world where bloody is used on a regular, casual, basis by the both media and those around me has normalised the phrase in my vocabulary. I usually use the term to place emphasis and give additional meaning to my speech, and definitely not as a swear word. But, while I don’t use it in context as a swear word to mean something bad, I also don’t quite think that bloody has the same connotations as other words that provide emphasis, such as very. Bloody seems to have a layer of meaning which makes it heavier than everyday terms, but not in a way as to make it constitute a swear word. For example, compare the differences between “fucking great”, “bloody great” and “very great”. The first one, with the use of the swear, I think implies a sense of sarcasm, with the overall meaning of the phrase being bad. The third phase obviously has a much more positive meaning. The use of bloody in the context I think implies a sense of friendliness, of mateship, obviously with a positive meaning, but in a way that goes beyond using a word such as ‘very’. Using the “where the bloody hell are you” in the Australian tourism campaign was a way of expressing this openness and friendliness that the Australian context of bloody implies to others. The controversy that the ad campaign created was simply other countries failing to recognise this contextual Australian use of the term.

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