Computer medicated communication is any communication done by humans
through multiple devices. Cmc is also referred to as cmd computer
mediated disclosure is a form of writing. What medium the writing is
done though reflects on a persons setting. Social, professional and
educational are suppose require different forms of communication. Have
you noticed how I word this, making sure to include suppose to. The
reason is because in today's society people mostly young adults don't
know the difference of how to communicate. Communicating has unwritten
rule that a lot of people don't know. It's more like a common sense kind
of approach that should be taken. I personally think the rule of thumb
should be when in doubt always communicate professionally. Even on my
job I'll hear people approach my manager in an unprofessional way. (Are
they that comfortable?) Maybe they feel comfortable to do so but I
personally believe it is best to always maintain a professional approach
to things and to keep a certain distance. The same would be true for an
educational setting. For me keeping things professional shows respect
not only for the person but for there position above you.
Speech communication for me overrides writing communication for me.
Actually face to face communication is the best medium. Nothing beats
looking in someone face and seeing their emotions while they talk. Like
take sarcasm for example when discussed in class how do we show sarcasm
through texting one said they capitalize letters, put quotation marks or
even just type with no extra emphasis. This makes me think bad and
wonder if my friends have ever been sarcastic with me. Being that I
never really take note on these thing. Like today I was texting a friend
of mine and I hit the capitalize but for one word and failed to take it
off forth enemy and I ended up writing through rest of the conversation
in capital letters. She must of thought I was yelling or being
sarcastic throughout out the hole conversation. In testily I was just
lazy. This issue would not arise if we were talking face to face or even
verbally through the phone.
The second reading made me really look back a couple of years in time
and really disgust what our generation has come to with technology.
Email was considered the default mode of communication through devices.
Can you imagen sitting and waiting to get an email (picture with dial up connection) Awwwwww No.
I too prefer face to face communication because you get immediate feedback whether it be verbal or physical. One can also tell if a person is paying attention or not. However, personally speaking- text messages are not the only things that can be taken the wrong way or misread. I have experienced times when things I said were taken the wrong way or misunderstood and vice versa. There has been times where, I have misunderstood a person or have taken things the wrong way. This can happen especially on "first impressions" when we do not really know a person well, or may be meeting them for the first time, it can be hard to distinguish if a person is trying to be funny, sarcastic, etc because we do not know the persons character. But, it is not exlcusive to people we do not know well, there were times where I "misread" or misunderstood a person I know well enough. That raises a big question in general about CMC and Face to Face communication.
ReplyDeleteNow, as for unwritten rules about the way we should communicate depending on our setting is pretty much widely practiced. It's kind of like a norm. It reminds me about last weeks discussion code-switching, I think its the same concept. A person speaks a certain way depending on their surroundings. Politeness is key, I will speak politely to anyone and everyone regardless of where I may be. I could be amongsts friends, classmates, famiy, anywhere and poltiness is just the way to go for me. (Unless of course push comes to shove, and still I do not use " $%&#@!! " ) However, there are methods and practices commonly used, I would not speak to a coworker or anybody I do not know well freely in a sense where I tell them about my life or etc. There would always be a level of professionalism invloved in the way I speak and carry myself.
CMC is amazing! Now if you really think about it, CMC has changed greatly throughout the years. Remember back when you needed to be a paid subscriber to one of the internet providers? Like Netscape and AOL - the ever present (and irritating) dial up connection (I hated it - sometimes when people would call, the internet connection was dropped! Or it would take forever and a decade just to have a successful connection). Mostly everyone used AOL just for the bragging rights about having an AOL screename and having an enormous Buddy List, some of which you had never met in person! (Perhaps, just a random chatroom?).
ReplyDeleteNowadays, IM/AIM, and even chatrooms are so obsolete. Seriously, who still keeps up to date with it? Especially now that we have smartphones which include text messaging, FaceTime, and other apps that allow for communication. It's true what Susan Herring says in her article, CMC was crude and fragmented in the late 1990s.
In terms of communication preferences, I like both. This is probably because both F2F communication and CMC (text/email) allows me to reach more people within a specific time period. As we've discussed before, who doesn't love multitasking? In terms of there being miscommunication - it's a human flaw; regardless of the mean of communication, it's bound to happen.
For the "unwritten rules on communication", like Yosmaris says - it's a norm, so it's more or less assumed that everyone knows how to act depending on their situations. You have to know who you're speaking with and how they wish to be addressed; some people prefer there to be a rigid social ranking, others are more lax.
CONTEXT. CONTEXT. CONTEXT. Every bit of our communication and the way we go about expressing ourselves all depends on the context in which that communication takes place. I honestly do not think that I would prefer face to face communication over CMC in most instances. I think it is too difficult, and my relationships too complicated, to make a generalization. As for having “common sense” when approaching people and how one should address people, all I can say is common sense is not really that common; it depends on the sociolinguistic variable background that individual comes from. So, I am not sure that I would completely agree that most people know that there are unwritten rules for communication or at least are consciously aware that there are unwritten rules. I would say that on a general sense people do act accordingly to the unwritten rules but that is only because they see others around them doing following them. There are, nevertheless, slipups made. I guess that is why so many people are so afraid of all these CMC venues because it does not require a formal standard and when people do not have a formal standard there are that many more ways to “break the rules” of social communication.
ReplyDeleteI am not exactly sure that I entirely understand people’s fear of the changes that of our language and the way we communicate goes through. I mean, we do not speak or communicate the way people did 1,000 years ago; we do not speak the same way people did even 60 years ago. Language and communication changes just as the people and the society that is around them change. Our language and behavior is a living entity, if you will, and it will evolve and adapt as we adapt to our surroundings and environment. All technology has done is increase our speed to communicate with each other and extended the distance and breadth of our social networks. CMC has become ubiquitous in the United States and it will remain ubiquitous as long as we keep it there.
Computer mediated disclosure is basically “formal” writing for face-to-face speech. I used formal in quotation marks because formality socially driven by class, race, age and gender. Now, knowing this CMD is driven by the social aspects in our culture making these written forms “formal.” An example of this will be writing an email to a professor or texting your father. Although texting is not as formal to some, it is to this day in age considered a quicker way to get a message sent. One of my friends gets her schedule through texting her supervisor, yet it wouldn’t be convenient use to some people to ask through email simply because it is too formal or maybe they may not prefer email. Compared to email, I think the reasons why people prefer texting sometimes is because of the accessibility of having a quicker less formal writing than the email and because in text you can get away with some syntactic structures. Other than formality, I believe email or text is still communication it just depends on the time replied by the sender, which can be a good or bad thing. A quick replier maybe perceived as turning the dial up, and a slow replier maybe perceived as turning the dial down. In many cases the slow replier is being stereotyped into many negative connotations.
ReplyDeleteWaiting on an email can be exhausting for people that live in the city, yet it may not be for others who live in different time zones. I prefer face-to-face all the way because it makes life easier. I don’t like going around the bush! If I talk to you over text I may understand how educated you are, yet you can’t get away with lying through speech. While in speech there is tonality, turn taking, pauses to show respect for whoever is speaking, and pronunciation in texting these structured are bound to be violated. Speech is the best to signal who that person really is.
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ReplyDeleteHumans are social beings, hence why we'd prefer face-to-face conversations over computer mediated ones. Our ability to communicate the way we do is really the only thing that makes us humans, humans. If our ability to communicate were to be taken away from us, life would be simply impossible. I do agree that there're unspoken rules about CMC. I feel like if these laws were ever to be broken, we'll be placed in awkward predicaments - and no one likes awkward predicaments. CMC has made language revolutionary. We speak in genres that (only) our friends understand, and we mock speech in a way that is unbearable for others to follow along. I totally agree Jen's "CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT". Ultimately, context, anywhere (really), is the most significant thing. Hypothetically: You are talking to your one friend with the only thick Spanish accent and they suddenly say: "I went to the bottle field, and won". Based on the context, you obviously understood they meant to say: "I went to the battle field, and won".
ReplyDeleteLanguage is amazing, and this is one of the reasons why.
Nowadays, we rely on computers. I am thinking about in the past, humans do everything by hand. We did homework on a piece of paper, talking to people face-to-face or on phone, we hear each other's beautiful, lovely voice. Now, things change. Human do everything on computer even in some places, technology is replacing humans. For example, at supermarket, some counters do not require a person to scan products. Some professors only accept typed-homework. We communicate with people by e-mail, Facebook chat. I do think it is convenient especially I am friends and family overseas. Talking to them through the internet is actually a lot cheaper. But one thing I didn't really consider and Herring's article, the one was written 2004 reminded me, which is privacy. What we put on the internet can be traced. Our browsing history is recorded which causing us to be followed by tons of spams and advertisements.Once you put stuff on the internet, it may be shared right at the moment you post it, which means it doesn't help though you delete your post at the third second.
ReplyDeleteWhat I like about the the article that is written by Herring in 2004 is that the author pointed out how technology changes which we may not really realize and the issues that are caused by technology change.
At the end of the day I believe that most of us prefer to have face-to-face contact. For someone like me who doesn't have much patience and needs instant gratification, I urge for the face to face contact. It's what we do. Now, going into the context as Jen and Karen have mentioned I couldn't agree even more. It depends on the relationhip and what kind of language you use with the person you're communicating with. However, we are living in a world where CMC rules and that's the way we communicate the fastest and I suppose...easiest. Of course, like somethings being communicated, it might be "lost in translation". Even if it's synchronous and you know the other person is chatting with you in "real time" there's somehow most of the time going to be some wall or boundary between you two.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is always changing, that for certain. So, for whatever reason our language or any way we communicate changes, it's really inevitable. If we speak informal or formally over email, those are the unwritten rules of communicating through email. Can you imagine 30 years from now? The technology will be something we can't even think about. I am sure we'll be able to beam ourselves to people's houses just to communicate face-to-face.
Yes everyone is right people are suppose to automatically know. But think about the children coming up that don't know. These are things I personally face everyday. In the world outside of college people really dont know theses unwritten rules.
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely correct - that the majority of the world does not know these unwritten rules and it unfortunately prohibits them from higher education, job opportunities and socio-economic mobility. Language use is rooted in power structures that have been in all societies for a long long time. The only way to influence that power dynamic for the next generation and allow those who are not "born into knowing" is to identify what those unwritten rules are and explicitly teach them. The danger in this is losing other varieties of language. For example, it would be a huge loss if everyone who speaks Patois, AAVE, Southern English or Singapore English started speaking General American Dialect (GAD). However, it would be great if people who speak Patois, AAVE, etc. as a first language have access to information about the GAD rules and use them to have access to greater power, voice and mobility. First step is identifying those unwritten rules that the gatekeepers adhere to.
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