Notes: Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication
Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication
By Sara Kiesler, Jane Siegel, and Tomothy W. McGuire, 1984
The following notes may sometimes be very immature. They are just some intuition thoughts emerged in my brain when I was reading the article.
As far as I am concerned, this is an important paper. Because many points of the last part of this paper are still under discussion now, from which point we can say that the author has a great vision of the future.
That this article mainly focused on the issue that has never been talked about is probably one reason why it is important. Why the author wrote this article was that “The functions and impact of computer-mediated communication are still poorly understood”. This reminds me that maybe machine learning and AI is facing the same situation. Most of the public just stay at the level of having heard of it but have no concept of what it is actually. So I think this field is expected to be explored more.
The “Dramaturgical Weakness” reminds me of emoji. I used to think it as a normal thing. But after reading this article, I began to regard it as a tremendous invention because it can express almost every emotion of human beings and therefore solved the “Dramaturgical Weakness” problem at least partially. Nowadays, we have audios and videos together with texts to share with each other, it is enough for most situations. But it does not work in a relationship situation. When people are in love, Videos with sound are still not enough. They need to actually touch each other’s bodies. Why I can say these words so confidently is that I’ve had personal experience. So maybe we should figure out another way to solve this problem, is AR a solution? I’m not sure.
As for the explanations for the experiment results, I have some personal opinions: I think among those three factors, feedback is the main problem. Let’s compare these two pairs of things:
- SE agile development VS. traditional software development.
- Face-to-face communication VS. computer oriented communication.
In an instant online conversation, we usually want to know if the opposite had read our message or not(Read function, and how they feel). And we can easily get into anxiety if we cannot get feedbacks in time. Agile development means more frequent communications which mean more feedbacks as well. More iterations can make sure that developers can adjust to the changes more confidently and timely, which inspires me to think that if this is the same problem in any missions that require information exchanges.
In my opinion, computers can help people get into a deeper discussion about one issue because of the time we are approved are a lot more than a face-to-face conversation. In an FTF conversation, we must face the pressure from the other person which will strongly influence our decisions, which can explain why there are fewer decision shifts in an FTF conversation.
In general, I think we need to consider more about the psychological aspects as we are developing software or create new inventions.