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60 COMMUNICA TION THEORY

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C CMC as cyberspace The benefit of the process models for studying the second
media age is that they provide a departure from exclusively content- and
linguistically based models of media analysis. In doing so, they begin to
explore the ‘ends of the chains’ of communication events, taking into
account the significance of who is speaking, the nature of the medium in
which this speech occurs, and the effects of communication events for the
listener.
However, the early information theorists are unable to address two
important questions in CMC: the precise techno-social nature of the medium
that ‘mediates’ in CMC, and the kind of identities that exist on-line.
To illustrate this, consider Gerbner’s model. Gerbner’s advance was
to show how a sender’s or receiver’s appreciation of a medium could
actually alter the content of an individual message to the point where, he
argues, it is imperative that the medium-contexts of communication must
always be taken into account. Of course, this insight is valuable if the
medium that is implicit in the communication process is capable of repro-
ducing the structure or appearance of an object or external reality (ana-
logue communication). With digital communication, however, where
there is no analogy entailed in the communication process, the ability
of a communicant (who is virtually immersed) to make sense of what
the digital substructure signifies socially is almost entirely lost. Aprominent
example is that of HTML, the mark-up language used for putting pages
on the World Wide Web. When the pages are finished they can be analogi-
cally and graphically hyperlinked with other pages and interactively
interfaced on screen. However, the mathematical code that underpins it
plays little or no part in cognitive communication.
Interestingly, it is only when the complex binary code that underpins
so much of what we actually see on the screen becomes rendered as an
analogue interface that it begins to make sense – not as language, but as
‘space’.
One of the central tenets of computer-mediated communication theory
is that CMC enables a form of ‘socially produced space’ (Jones, 1995: 17),
namely cyberspace. This is said to be comparable to a kind of electronic
agora. 15 The agora, dating from post-Homeric Greece, refers to an open
space in which goods and information are exchanged. In the agora, infor-
mation is typically relayed by word of mouth or by messages posted on
walls, a process which even became institutionalized in European life in
the form of the cosmopolitan coffee house.
The café, which is frequently attributed with the status of bedrock
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of ‘civil’ society, has of course become an extensive carrier of the prose-
lytization of cyberspace with the large number of cyber-cafés that have
sprung up in cities all over the world. These (embodied) cafés are places
in which the rituals of the old world – coffee consumption – and of the
new – logging on to an ICQ, MUD, MOO or email service – become
entirely blended.