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Theories of Cybersociety 55
group. A symptom of this is the fact that CMC literature is often concerned
with how individuals try to develop ways of substituting the absence of
face-to-face relations on the Internet: for example, by observing neti-
11
quette (the idea that cyberspace demands forms of polite protocol one
would expect in embodied life), or by the growth of emoticons – the
symbols used in email denoting facial expressions. 12
There are four major ways in which CMC literature differs from the
second media age thesis. Firstly, it is focused on the uniqueness of the
communication event in cyberspace. Secondly, it is concerned much more
with interaction than with integration, that is, the myriad of individual
interactions rather than the overall social contexts and rituals by which
these interactions become meaningful. Thirdly, unlike ‘media studies’,
some CMC frameworks are interested in how ‘external factors’ influence
a communication event. With broadcast analysis, very little exploration
occurs of how outer contexts influence media content; rather, media con-
tent is assessed according to how it might reflect or express non-media
realities. Finally, whilst not concerned with the kinds of social integration
which might underpin CMC, it is concerned with information integration,
the way in which communicating by way of computers is based in infor-
mation processes that can be found in a burgeoning number of inter-
actions mediated by computer. This latter point opens out the domains of
cybernetics and the information society, fields of analysis which can be
broadly collected together under the umbrella of information theory.

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I Information theory The CMC perspective is a continuation of conduit models
of communication first discussed in the 1950s. So before looking at the
contemporary features of CMC it is worth sketching the main contours of
information theory. Oddly, these theories were less relevant to broadcast
than they are to dyadic reciprocity – be it face-to-face or electronically
extended. The fact that they achieved some considerable influence in the
United States during the height of broadcast defies the fact that they were
never able to accommodate the phenomena of performativity, of specta-
cle, and reification examined in the previous chapter. Dyadic models
of communication are not very helpful in explaining what happens when
a few centres of cultural production send messages to an indeterminate
mass.
The main elements of this outlook, some of which have been
mentioned in the Introduction, are reducible to a process-driven ‘posi-
tivist’ model in which intersubjectivity, the communication event between
two entities, becomes the ultimate yardstick with which to measure other
communication processes. The embryo for this view is most commonly
located in Shannon and Weaver’s monograph The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (1949).
As Chris Chesher (1997) appraises this text for its relevance to the
Internet: