The Glass Ball

The Internet has been in use for just under two decades now, and we’ve already witnessed sweeping changes in the way online communication is conducted. Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, had simply wanted to facilitate the sharing of documents among physicists at CERN back in 1990. Today, we have email, instant messenging, streaming video, and social networking sites. Businesses, schools, government agencies, and ordinary citizens around the world rely on the Internet for communication and information exchange. As we make progress, the web will continue becoming richer as a communication medium, and it will permeate society to an even greater extent that it does today.

This has implications for several of the theories we’ve discussed in class this semester. For one, the CFO theories will become even less relevant than they already are. The increasing prevalence of avatars, VoIP, and video conferencing technologies means that CMC is rapidly outgrowing the “text-only” environment it was once restricted to. (Some might even argue that CMC can match FtF even without additional cues.) As more and more online spaces gain richness, media richness theory will begin to make less sense. You will choose a richer media to communicate with those you know really well (i.e., FtF). Text-only spaces will be relegated to communication with outsiders (perhaps people you’ll only talk to once or twice). The synchronicity of the medium shall largely determine which online spaces are used for efficiency, at least when communication is one-to-one.

However, text-only online spaces will never really become fully extinct. USENET, established in 1980 and still thriving, is a testament to this assertion. Chatrooms and forums are convenient for large group discussions among a community of members, where added richness would just distract from the content. In fact, the text-only nature of social support groups is even an advantage when people want to avoid embarrassment. Therefore, it will ultimately possible for theories like the impression management model and McKenna relationship facilitation factors to stay relevant in predicting text-based relationships and interaction.

The hyperpersonal model and SIDE are also likely here to stay for a long time. Humans are essentially prediction machines: we are wired to generalize, draw conclusions, and make predictions about our environment based on what we know. When we know just a little, we will inevitably make all our predictions based on that bit of knowledge. Greater richness will not much change this fact; even in FtF we make generalizations about people based on their appearance, age, gender, race, voice, etc. Were this not so, prejudice, discrimination, and stereotypes would not be so ubiquitous.

Advances in technology may blur the boundary between virtuality and real life. Imagine glasses or visors which augment your view of the world, allowing you to digitally interact with other objects and people in your physical environment. (Simple electronic glasses have already been attempted for basic vision correction.) Would Internet addicts still be considered as such if online devices became as necessary as hearing aids or contact lenses?

Serious lying online will become less common overall, for two reasons. First, as newer generations become more familiar with the Internet, they will realize that online interactions are highly recordable. For serious lies, many people currently don’t realize that IM conversations can get logged automatically, search engines will crawl websites, and corporate email is routinely stored in backup. Second, increased richness means that online communication will feel less distributed and less visually anonymous. Theories we have developed about lies (social distance theory, feature-based model, etc.) will continue to apply, but less strongly than they used to.

Looking forward, one might envision a convergence of theories from general psychology and sociology and the theories proposed in a social computing psychology class such as this one. This would not be surprising: as technology enables richer forms of communication in various dimensions, it lets us inch ever closer to a true FtF interaction (while retaining the option of communication in leaner psychological spaces.)

One issue that we didn’t really touch upon in this class was privacy. The dawn of the Internet (and Web 2.0 in particular) has granted us access to a huge network of information and people. People are eager to broadcast to the world, throwing out tons of information about themselves online. In other contexts, much of this information would be considered personal/private matters, so why do people relinquish it online so easily? This is particularly noticeable in personal blogs, social networking sites, Twitter, AIM profiles, etc., where there is a broad but mostly anonymous audience. More importantly, what are the consequences of this large-scale self-disclosure, in terms of both how the public perceives you, and how you respond? We have been told time and again to censor our Facebook profile, lest employers stumble upon our unprofessional traits. Perhaps one day, people will casually overlook these things, realizing that everyone has a multifaceted lifestyle and it is nothing special. Private life self-disclosure would become the norm, and no one would feel the need to partition their self-presentation into professional, casual, and personal categories.