Post 7: Computer Mediated Communication

The advent of the internet has changed the way the world communicates so greatly in the last 15 years. In the past, people could only communicate through letter writing and that took great lengths of time especially if those they were trying to contact were overseas. At present, only a few seconds is needed to send an electronic mail across continents and with the use of more and more instant messaging systems like IRC, ICQ and MSN, people are speaking to more and more people over continents easier and faster than ever before.

What does this all mean for us humans?

This new era of information technology has presented us with a new medium of communication and as we learnt in class, an entirely new language; netlingo. This is so interesting as it has both the characteristics of speaking and writing and undertakes specific writing forms to mean different things. I believe that it is of utmost importance to understand and keep up to date with how this new CMC language style evolves as internet instant messaging becomes more and more rampant. Should one not understand this netlingo, a capitalization of a word could sound rude to someone who understands it for example and many misunderstandings could arise.

We also learnt the differences in how a specific gender speaks to someone of the same and opposite gender online. This was of great interest to me as I realized that the differences are very stark. I shall not go in depth into the exact differences as they are all in the notes but it is very interesting how men and women communicate online to their own or opposite sex. I feel that the application of this new knowledge is very vast as we are now aware of the perculairities of how we humans speak and how we can react to manipulate an online conversation to, perhaps, reduce misunderstandings and to make the interaction more mutual and interesting. For example, users of dating websites and dating chat services could benefit so much for this knowledge about how the opposite sex ticks in relation to how they speak online; it is clear that the phenomenon of online dating and people getting married in real life to their online partners is increasingly becoming more rampant especially with the launch of new social networking sites like facebook and twitter.

Lastly, I feel that there is a new area in which CMC is fast expanding into, the realm of online avatar life. With the launch of Second Life (even NUS is on it), people are fast being drawn into a fantasy life online in which they can lead lives that would otherwise never have imagined. Real money is used to buy objects online and real friendships can be forged. Therefore, in this situation, the understanding of CMC is integral to the smooth facilitation of communication in this area which is fast taking over our real lives; translating it into a world where "writing looks like speech" and "speech looks like writing" holds the trump card over other mediums of language.