Colleges: All things media? Emerging communication technologies and their impact on us
and society.
Introduction:
Mass communication:
1 Public
- class is not public
2 Technologically mediated
- television, something that mediates a certain message
3 Indirect
- class is direct, journalist writes something, and you read it later, it is indirect
4 One-sided
- class, he tells us a story and we listen, sends a message and you cannot immediately
answer.
5 Dispersed audiences
- audience is all over the place but they do not really see you
- More and more a trend towards computer mediated communication, with machines,
chatbots, AI
- This development disserts more attention of us in communication.
What is interpersonal communication? Face to face communication? Transfer and
understanding of information. A sender carries information and sends it to a receiver, who
reacts on it. Does not need to be verbal. Exchange of messages between two or more
people.
Face to Face communication:
- Intentionality/Awareness of all involved persons
- You choose what you share
- Mutual co-orientation
- You have to be aware of the communication, what does the other expect of me
- Direct
- not mediated
- Negotiation of meaning (encoding and decoding)
- Try to understand what the communication partners are trying to say, not the same
way I encoding and you decoding
- Exchange of communicator and receiver role, reciprocity
- breaking the role of traditional lecturing, asking questions and having discussions,
more reciprocity, sender and receiver role
- Process (dynamic, changing)
- not static, something is constantly going on, changing roles
- Common code, signs, symbols, and rules of communication
- raising your hand, I have a question, we are talking in English
- Multifunctional
- here is a lecturer who teaches something about communication, and you have to
learn something, you enter a lift, and they talk about the weather: why? Is this really
about the weather? No, it is about breaking uncomfortable silence. How are you? In
, an English speaking country you don’t have to answer that, it is just hello. Different
functions of communication.
- Multimodal
- non-verbal communication, lecturer wants to walk around and uses his hands.
Tricky because other countries which have other non-verbal signs.
Computer-Mediated communication: CMC (Thurlow et al., 2004, p. 15)
- “Human communication…
- communication between humans, humans on each side
- … achieved through, or with the help of,
- … computer technology”.
- something neutral in-between, which is not true
Dimensions of computer-mediated communication (CMC)
- Mode
- Text, audio, visual, different ways to deliver a message, is it okay to text or is it
better to call?
- Synchronous vs. Asynchronous
- e-mail, you sent something, but you do not expect an immediate reaction. But you
do get information: wow an e-mail from 2 o clock at night, still working?
- Public vs. non-public
- Social media or whats-app private.
- Dyadic vs. group
- only two people or a sports club like who is going to drive to the game.
- Anonymous vs. nonymous
- identifiable or not
- professional/work-related vs. private
- certain apps for personal and private stuff, like Linkedin, more for business.
What is technology?
- A manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods or
knowledge.
- you need to have a goal, it does not have to be material like a camera but it can also
be a chatbot or something, which you cannot touch, but it is technical.
- Embodiment: can I touch it or not? Chatbot is on a platform and you can reach it on a
computer, infrastructure embodiment!
Emerging technologies: (Rotolo et al., 2015)
1 Radical novelty
- placed in the line of technologies that we already know, like radio and wifi. Wifi can
still be novel
2 Relatively fast growth
- of significance, it should grow quickly, think of smartphones, in the bigger part of
the 2000s, a lot of people still had Nokia’s, smartphones exponentially conquered the
market.
, 3 Coherence
- there is a coherent name for something, mid 2000s study on online communication
because there was a lot of home internet access, friend-networking sites. Now social
media, but they did not guess that it would get this big.
4 Potential to have prominent impact on socio-economic domains
- there will be companies that will be extremely successful and other ones that will
not. Life was really different before there were smartphones. It changed our life’s
radically. Socio-economic impact
5 Uncertainty and ambiguity in the emergence phase
- big companies invested a lot of money in something that may not work. You do not
have the golden recipe to make the perfect ‘smartphone’.
Crucial technological changes: (e.g., Eberl, 2016, Van Bergen, 2016)
1 Exponential increases in computing power
- smartphones, the laptops are much more powerful than years ago
2 mobile connectivity
- we are taking it for granted, we have Wi-Fi and it is ‘normal’. You only notice it when
it is not there. We don’t have to be at a certain place to connect to the internet. And
we rely on it
3 Dataification; networked information
- all we do is turned into data, everything into 0 and 1. Powerful, dangerous, when it
is in a network form it can be accessed. Big data. Machine learning could develop
4 Miniaturizations of sensors, microphones and cameras
- They have become smaller. Pictures we take with our smartphone are amazing. You
don’t need a camera.
5 Cloud computing
- the data we produce, the things we save are somewhere in the cloud. From
technological perspective it is really powerful, it frees up space. It is also problematic,
but we will hear that later.
6 Progress in artificial intelligence, machine learning
- was considered to be totally useless.
The hype cycle of emerging technologies:
- 10 jaar geleden Duivenstein et al., 2014, p. 22
- the idea there are 5 phases,
- a new technologies is born, technology trigger
- people are getting hyped, peak of inflated expectations
- trough of disillusionment
- slope of enlightement
- lets go back to the drawing board and focus what we can really do with this
technologies.
- plateau of productivity