Page 227 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STEVE JONES AND STEPHANIE KUCKER

and Trevino 1995). Driven by the ‘cues filtered out’ orientation, much research
on media choice concluded that individuals faced with interpersonal com-
munication objectives made a conscious choice to use F2F over CMC owing
to CMC’s social deficiencies (Lea 1991).
Despite the dominance of cues-filtered-out, task-based research programs in
the 1980s, some early research did reveal the emergence of ‘social uses’ of these
technologies, and particularly email (Rice and Love 1987; Steinfeld 1985).
Steinfeld’s (1985) study of organizational email messaging systems found that
the mail system was used for a wide variety of purposes, with two major
dimensions – ‘task’ and ‘socio-emotional’. While the former mostly involved
the transfer and acquisition of information (not unexpected), the latter related
to the maintenance of personal relationships, ‘feeling a part’ of the organiza-
tion, and being ‘in touch’. Similarly, a study by Rice and Love (1987) revealed
that workers find social support, companionship, and a sense of belonging
online.
In the early 1990s, scholarly dissatisfaction with perspectives that regard
CMC technologies as impersonal and ill-suited to interpersonal interactions
led to the emergence of new theoretical lenses through which to explore the
social aspects of CMC. The ‘social information processing perspective’ used the
comparison of CMC with F2F to illustrate that ‘interpersonality’ does indeed
form via CMC, but at a slower rate than in F2F interactions (Walther and
Burgoon 1992). When viewed from this perspective, the difference between
CMC and F2F was not the ‘amount of social information exchanged’, as
argued by early theorists, but rather ‘the rate of social information exchange’
(Walther 1996: 10). By centralizing the role of rate, the social information
processing perspective pushed for more longitudinal research designs that
could account for relational development over time. It was argued that early
perspectives regarding CMC as impersonal by nature were misinformed
by programs of research that targeted workgroups over limited-time
engagements (Walther 1992).
A more recent outgrowth of this perspective, the ‘hyperpersonal’ view, sug-
gests that there are instances when CMC may be ‘more socially desirable than
[individuals] tend to experience in parallel F2F interaction’, and thereby may
surpass F2F communication in the ability to establish interpersonal relation-
ships (Walther 1996: 17). This assertion is based on the premise that, even
though CMC may reduce non-verbal context cues (i.e. facial expressions,
gestures, tone of voice, etc.), such a lack of cues may enhance interpersonal
communication in a range of situational contexts, and particularly where status
differentials are present.
Both the ‘cues filtered out’ and ‘social information processing’ research
programs have been anchored within the organizational setting and fixed
to a workgroup context. Moreover, they have foregrounded interpersonal
communication and de-emphasized the role culture may play not only in
organizational terms but also extra-organizationally. As such, while issues of

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