Extra Credit Post: What's to come? More CMC

The future of the class this entry is for, the Psychology of Social Computing is going to change a great deal. What is going to make this change is the arrival of new generations that have lived their entire lives surrounded by the internet and a world that changes very rapidly with technology.

Theories now are done with people who are normally very comfortable with computer mediated communication (CMC) but who have not necessarily grown up with it. As a culture, we still see excessive time spent online as a bad thing. I expect in the future, as more and more important things in lives, business or personal, are done online, it will be more accepted to spend more time online. This is going to change a lot of views on the theories surrounding CMC. CFO perspectives will virtually disappear because it will be understood that time as mentioned Social Information Processing theory it a large part of how much people know about each other. People will grow up online, like in person, and will not view a difference between CMC and FtF making the CFO assumptions disappear as a CMC phenomenon.

However, the theories that are going to really escalate in scale, and possibly have to be adjusted or completely changed, are the ones like Impression Management. The better technologies are going to change the ease and ability of people being able to represent themselves online. This will be very important to see because people are going to obviously try to show a better light of who they are. Also, since CMC will be used more and more often, it will become less and less important if someone is presenting a different avatar or picture or any description of their real self.

That will be one of the most interesting changes. If we spend 3 hours doing online communicating now, and 3-6 FtF, what happens when the ratio switches? If we are spending twice as much time communicating online than face to face, I think that it will change two different things. The first, I think lying about some identity cues will become less of a problem, I also think that the representation online, (think Impression Management) will become more important as well. Current face to face “sayings” like you can only make one first impression, will be integrated into CMC and people will adjust to that, and want to have more control of their representations.

So to wrap up a relatively scattered entry, the biggest change in the way Psychology of Social computing will be studied, is going to come from the increased integration of CMC into our lives, and the better technology and the changes that will make to CMC.