Communication and Technology

Communication and technology research has experienced parallel growth to the dissemination and adoption of personal computers, with key developments and steady growth occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, immense development in the 1990s, and continued proliferation, refinement, and development in the new millennia to the present time. Much of the scholarly work in communication and technology has often been categorized as computer-mediated communication (CMC) or human-computer interaction research. Although the current plethora of devices available goes well beyond just the computer, the CMC categorization has persisted and is most often used in the communication discipline. CMC has been widely studied using nearly every social scientific research method conceivable. Therefore, this entry broadly discusses the primary contexts, methods, and approaches in which communication and ...