Page 225 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEVE JONES AND STEPHANIE KUCKER

on to a field, matrix or grid, and by the dispersion of selves externally (as we
traverse cyberspace) and internally (as we adopt personas in interaction). How-
ever, these questions insufficiently address the cultural consequences of
Internetworking.

Perspectives on Internetworking
To understand best the limited role culture has played in Internet studies, it is
necessary to historicize and review the main threads of Internet research.
Much of the early research on Internetworking stems from studies of
computer-mediated communication (CMC) targeted toward work-related
uses within organizations, with studies of electronic mail messaging and
groupware prevailing. Electronic mail (or ‘electronic messaging systems’) has
most commonly been used as a model of electronic communication, and has
reinforced text as a paradigm in Internet studies. In this representative role,
email is approached with assumptions (which it has also reinforced) about the
properties and uses of CMC technologies. One assumption has been that
CMC is in essence a medium of transmission. That is, not only has early
research on CMC employed what Carey (1989) terms a ‘transmission model’
for understanding communication, it has come to view CMC as fundamentally
a means of transmission. Furthermore, it is taken for granted that the point of
CMC is interpersonal messaging, whether multiple persons receive the message
or not. Users of CMC are thus abstracted from the contexts within which they
use CMC technologies.
A consequence of such abstraction is that research centralizing the import-
ance of technological characteristics regards text-based CMC (i.e. listserv,
Usenet, email) as lacking in social context cues – verbal and non-verbal infor-
mation – that are presumed essential to interpersonal exchange (Kiesler, Siegel,
and McGuire 1984; Sproull and Kiesler 1986). The argument that a lack of
context cues limits socio-emotional information led early CMC scholars to
brand these media as inherently impersonal and thereby best suited to
unequivocal, work-related tasks (Kiesler, Siegel, and McGuire 1984). Of course,
the very perception of CMC as task-centered would likely lead to no other
conclusion. Moreover, the organizational settings used for the earliest CMC
studies, the ‘newness’ of the technology in organizations and workgroups, and
its insertion in pre-existing work processes would also tend to support such a
conclusion.
Culnan and Markus (1987), using elements of social presence and media
richness theory, explained the early findings of CMC researchers (that CMC
lacks social context cues and is ill-suited to interpersonal interactions) by
naming them ‘cues filtered out’ approaches to CMC. The ‘cues filtered out’
perspective assumes that the number of channels available for the transmission
of impression-bearing data, and specifically non-verbal cues, marks the critical
difference between CMC and face-to-face (F2F) communication. While F2F

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