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Week 1: The Theoretical Backbone: Making Sense of Emerging
Communication Technologies
Lecture 1
Mass Communication (e.g., Maletzke, 1963)
● Public
● Technologically mediated
● Indirect
● One-sided (one person talks in the radio, the other side receives)
● Dispersed audience (the sender doesn’t know who/where/how the receivers are)
Face-to-face Communication
(e.g., Floyd, 2011; Pearson et al., 2003; Thurlow et al., 2004)
● Intentionality/awareness of all involved persons
● Mutual co-orientation
● Direct
● Negotiation of meaning (encoding and decoding)
we try to make sense of each other’s messages and get to a common understanding
It is about “What do you mean by that?”
● Exchange of communicator and receiver role, reciprocity
The role of sender and receiver can be exchanged
● Process (dynamic, changing)
Not like newspaper: you print it and cannot change
● Common code, signs, symbols, and rules of communication
● Multifunctional
Different cues: gestures etc.
E.g., talk about the weather: not to deliver a message, but to break a silence
● Multimodal
Computer-mediated Communication (Thurlow et al., 2004, p. 15)
● Human communication (human to human)
Avatar is human-machine communication
● achieved through with the help of
● computer technology
Dimensions of Computer-mediated Communication (Thurlow et al., 2004)
● Mode (text, audio, visual)
pics, video clips, emojis, all kinds of types
● Synchronous vs. asynchronous
Synchronous: answer the same time once it is sent
Asynchronous: answer late
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Attach meaning to the response time: if you send email at late night, your colleague
will think you are hard working
● Public vs non-public
the scope to which your message gets
the thing you show on LinkedIn is totally different from your private Instagram
● Dyadic vs group
● Anonymous vs anonymous
Do you use your real name? do u sign off with ur name
● Professional/work-related vs private/leisure related
Technology
“A manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or
knowledge”
(A laptop can be seen as a technology cuz it helps us accomplish tasks; paper can also be
seen as technology)
Emerging technologies (Rotolo et al., 2015)
● Radical novelty
(novelty can also refer to something that existed before, but used for a different
situation: wireless wifi already existed but then they were used for transferring
computer data)
● Relatively fast growth
● Coherence
(social media before was friend making sites and other things, at a certain point, they
all become one - social media)
● Potential to have prominent impact on socio-economic domains
(shopping, political campaigns, privacy, exam online etc. all related to technology)
● Uncertainty and ambiguity in the emergence phase
Crucial changes of technology (e.g., Eberl, 2016; Van Bergen, 2016)
● Exponential increases in computing power
● Mobile connectivity
● Datafication; networked information
● Miniaturization of sensors, microphones, and cameras
● Cloud computing
● Progress in artificial intelligence, machine learning
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Hype cycle of emerging tech (Duivestein et al., 2014, p. 22)
There is a pattern of how we deal and think of a new technology
- Technology trigger: all of a sudden there is a new technology, and we think this will
really change the world (a lot of hopes)
- Peak of inflated expectations: goes to the peak
- Trough of disillusionment: get disillusioned
- Slope of enlightenment: at certain point, take off again
- Plateau of productivity: stable stage (but not every technology can reach it: e.g.,
change of law, another new technology takes over)
Characteristics of Innovation (Rogers, 1995)
Five things to explain the acceptance of an innovation (or diffusion of innovation)
● Relative advantage
must be an incentive to use it, otherwise people will stick to what they’re used to
● Compatibility
how it is compatible or complementary to what we had before
● Complexity (or ease to learn to use)
how easy it is to use it or learn how to use it – simple is better (e.g., touch screen)
● Trialability
we want to know if it suits us, we try first (especially for expensive things)
● Observability
if we see others benefitting from the technology
Typology of adopters (Rogers, 1995)
● Innovators (2.5%)
enthusiastic, take the risk to be on the forefront of technology
● Early adopters (13.5%)
still enthusiastic, but not as much
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● Early majority (34%)
● Late majority (34%)
● Laggards (16%)
Week 2: The Theoretical Backbone: Making Sense of Emerging
Communication Technologies
Lecture 2
Theories in the acceptance of tech: (Vishwanath, 2015)
● Diffusion approach – Rogers (2015)
● Management-information-systems approach
- Technology acceptance model (TAM)
(if people accept one technology)
perceived ease (how simple it is to use)
perceived usefulness (is this useful)
- Unified theory of acceptance and use of tech (UTAUT)
Performance expectancy (how will the technology perform)
Effort expectancy (how long it take to master it)
Social influence (What we can express by having some brands)
Facilitating conditions (compatibility: can this be linked to smth I've done
before)
Gender, age and tech experience affect influences
● Cognitive approach (not so relevant)
Stages in research on CMC (Walther 1992, 1996)
