Concept 17

Throughout Module 2, 'Communicating in the Infosphere', I have continually found myself returning to a particular online resource: John Suler's 'The Psychology of Cyberspace'. I have found it to be a fascinating insight into the psychological aspects of peoples online behaviour especially pertinent when keeping it within the context of using the internet, with its broad spectrum of tools, to communicate with others. For this reason I will be using this as a resource for one of my annotations, due to it's relevance to Module 2 as a whole.

As opposed to asynchronous communication, synchronous communication relates to two or more people sitting at their computer simultaneously, in other words, both are online at the same time participating in a real-time form of communication. This is most often achieved through using mediums such as a chatroom, internet relay chat, an instant messenger eg MSN or ICQ etc. I think Concept 17 - The impact of text-based real-time chat, can impact us beneficially when we understand the context in which it should be used.

Technically speaking, you could argue that chat is an asynchronous form of communication and I guess, on closer inspection, I would tend to agree to some extent. Even thought it is in real-time, you still have time for reflection before writing a response to a message, even though it may only be minutes. This in comparison to the more asynchronous methods such as email, discussion boards etc in which it can be hours, days, sometimes weeks before you might post or send a reply.

In most cases, real-time chat gives us the ability to keep a record of our online conversations, which can then be used to reflect back on or refer to, at a later date. This is something that, normally, face to face communication does'nt allow. As discussed in Concept 17, due to the ability of the human brain being able to assimilate text much better than speech, we are able to conduct more than one conversation at a time, a kind of 'social mutliplicity' whereby

".....one can juggle many relationships in a short period of time or even at the same time....without the other people necessarily being aware of one's juggling act".

Real-time chat gives us this flexibilty without it being misconstrued or perceived as being rude, which quite possibly could be the case if we were to carry on mutiple conversations in a face to face situation.


Web Resources:

Suler, John. "The Basic Psychological Features of Cyberspace." May, 1996.http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/basicfeat.html (accessed March 22, 2007).

"Internet Communications Concepts Document." http://webct.curtin.edu.au/SCRIPT/305033_a/scripts/serve_home (accessed March 09, 2007).