Communication and Technology

Communication and Technology: A Historical Perspective

Research focused on social interaction through the use of digital communication technology originated in the 1970s. At that time, scholars such as Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff described anecdotal evidence of the ways that academic and scientific researchers socialized and shared meaningful interpersonal exchanges using early versions [Page 174]of the modern Internet that were developed by the U.S. government. This is significant to note for a few reasons. First, these meaningful social exchanges occurred despite the fact that these early networks would be considered quite crude and only offered text-based capabilities, not to mention slow processing speeds as compared to modern devices. Second, these early networks were developed to be a fully task-oriented system that would allow for essential communication to take place in the event of a large-scale attack on one or a few large cities in the United States. In other words, the first iterations of the Internet were not created or engineered with socialization purposes in mind, as has become the primary use of CMC today.

However, the perception of communication technology being impersonal and best suited for task-oriented purposes was a recurring theme in CMC research well into the 1980s. Scholars often proposed, and found evidence to support, the claim that text-based CMC groups would perform worse than similar face-to-face groups when given team-based tasks in experimental conditions. At that time, many scholars theorized that CMC inherently lacked the important attributes of face-to-face communication, such as nonverbal communication cues (e.g., eye contact, facial expressions, body position), and therefore would always be inadequate when compared to face-to-face communication. However, emerging research in the late 1980s and early 1990s began to uncover a great deal of evidence, as Hiltz and Turoff did a decade earlier, that the claim that CMC was “cold” and impersonal was flawed.

Theoretical Development of Communication and Technology