“Diminished social cues” compromise CMC interactions and are part of the technology landscape. How can the truth about anyone really be known?

There are reasons to prepare oneself for entering a new environment of any kind. Whether one approaches these new experiences in CMC environments with fear or hopefulness, I contend makes every difference about their behavior. How someone chooses to be known is often reflected in what disposition they adopt. The idea of fear certainly changes offline behavior and so it must creep into dimensions of how we to exist online. Manifestations of this mindset appear in subtle ways, especially without the ability to “be” in ones body and have appearance. Nancy Baym comments about this by summarizing much research about this area of interactivity: “The reduction of physical appearance cues…creates a kind of invisibility or anonymity (Carnevale and Probst, 1997; McKenna and Bargh, 2000; Sproul and Faraj, 1997; Turkle, 1996), which opens the potential for multiplicity of identities (Stone, 1995; Turkle, 1996), a high degree of privacy (Baron, 1998), and a lower sense of social risk (Curtis, 1997) or accountability (Stone, 1995) among other possibilities…(Baym, N. 2006, p.38).

Naturally it is logical to see that there are online dimensions of fear that now exist just as they do in the real world as discussed in the article titled “Second Thoughts About Second Life” which presents the phenomenon of the website about a full and ever expanding virtual world online. Bugeja ruminates about the risks in online communities: “Most of us concede that controversy occurs often enough in the real world. Why do we doubt it would occur in a virtual world whose service terms bestow anonymity and disavow liability?” (Bugeja, M., 2007, p.3). It seems necessary to then ask if we face fear on and offline how do we arm ourselves (must we arm ourselves?) online? And oddly enough a new question arises that seems almost out of place: Does insurance even exist for the kind of liability that might occur online?

Yet there must be hope for humankind. People as a whole around the globe have a fundamental need to look to the good in others – as cited by all religions everywhere. The question is how can we be sure we are interacting with as much of this “basic fundamental goodness” in others as much as possible most of the time? Clearly humankind continues to exhibit hope in the face of adversity through the ages and we will continue to do so. Some insight helps to further support these ideas from Joseph Walther’s article titled Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyper-personal Interaction as he “…seeks to explain relational development in the face of reduced cues. His social information processing theory proposes that, regardless of the medium, people experience the need to reduce uncertainty and increase affinity” (Baym, N. 2006, p.44). This observation seems hopeful to me that humankind does continue to strive to be authentic and have integrity, one person at a time.

Baym, N. (2006). Interpersonal Life Online. In L. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The Handbook of New Media, Updated Student Edition (35-54). London: Sage.

Bugeja, M. (2007, September 14). Second Thoughts About Second Life. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. C1. Retrieved September 11, 2007 from http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i03/03c00101.htm

Walther, J. (1996). Computer-Mediated Communication: Impersonal, Interpersonal, and Hyperpersonal Interaction. Communication Research, 23(3), 3-43.