Communication 813

Seminar in Mediated Communication

A VIRTUAL GRADUATE SEMINAR

Instructor: Ed Mabry, Ph.D.

--Ed Mabry

The plan for the course intentionally avoids (dis)privileging specific technologies with two notable exceptions. First, literature related to traditional mass media (e.g., radio, TV, print, film) is not included.

That area of study is more relevant to the Department of Mass Communication. Second, the growing body of literature on computer mediated communication and new technologies enabled by innovations in computer electronics (e.g., multi-media, teleconferencing, telephony, virtual reality) comprises the corpus of information. This body of literature has the potential for conceptually converging with existing communication theory. Yet, the potential has not been exploited to its fullest advantage and there is still substantial risk for intellectual fragmentation.

A parallel, although secondary, theme of the class involves experiencing, and experimenting with, integrating knowledge about communication and technology with the technologies that facilitate mediated communication. Thus, assignments are oriented towards using hypertext and Internet or World Wide Web [WWW] and a class website that students participate in reinventing throughout the term.

Students are expected to share the tasks of initiating intellectual directions and guiding themselves--and their classmates--in the dissemination, analysis, and creation of course-relevant information. In particular, students must maintain communicative visibility. They cannot rely on others to carry online dialogue. Everyone must proactively contribute to these dialogues even when the consequences of there inputs are ambiguous. There's no room for lurkers in an online course.

Seminar instructors function best as facilitators. They construct a knowledge framework students draw on to ground themselves in basic threads of information and, subsequently, for use in cultivating their unique learning goals and outcomes. A seminar instructor also serves a guidance function. Students' ongoing learning activities are monitored for feedback. This guidance emphasizes both ideational quality and direction. A student must be more than a "quick study." Posing incisive questions, finding useful applications, and discovering flaws in existing knowledge and reasoning are examples of student intellectual performance that affects instructor assessment. Both of these functional orientations seem well suited to the online format of the course.

Three assessment vehicles are used in this course.

1. ACTIVE PARTICIPATION. Students are expected to take the lead in online dialogic activities. Each session, you are expected to use your immersion in course materials to stimulate the class. Thus, you should be prepared to provide critical-analytical ideas and examples about key issues, concepts, and/or findings addressed in course material.

2. UNIT ASSIGNMENTS. Two-thirds of the course is structured around topical units introduced on a weekly basis. Each weekly session includes short assignments designed to reinforce the unit's informational foci and stimulate interaction. Everyone is expected to submit and discuss these assignments. Within certain constraints, choices of topics will be left to the authors.

3. WEBSITE REINNOVATION PROJECT. In collaboration with the instructor, students are expected to develop and implement a significant upgrade to the course website. This will include, but not be limited to, assessing the site's current contents and design, canvassing the field for more salient issues and/or resources, and assessing and modifying (as needed) the site's navigability and/or Internet connectivity. The project will be collaboration between students and instructor working as a team (unless class size requires multiple teams). Analyses and proposals for change, and Final Projects, are distributed to seminar members, *discussed* class sessions, and receive written critical responses from the instructor and other students.

Assessment weighting includes: 25% for formative submissions, and 75% for the Final Project.

Fifty percent of the final grade is determined by Items 1 & 2 (10% for Item 1 and 40% for Item 2) and the remaining 50% by Item 3.

Office hours for the Fall semester are: WR: 3:30 - 6:00 (Seminar students are given priority on Thursday). Appointments can be arranged on 1 – 2 days notice.

Once the class has completed the modules, it will move on to conducting its assessment of the website and generation of its suggested changes. Thus, the course is divided into two rather distinct segments of content and expected work products.

• MODULE 1: Defining Technology, Edward A. Mabry, Ph.D.

Technology is approached as a symbolic construct. Specialized language is asserted as the social heuristic on which the understanding of
technology is predicated and extended. Social differentiation and statification of language users, into user communities, is discussed as it pertains to communication of users' technology attributions and means of social influence.

• MODULE 2: The Digital Self in Cyberspace, Martha Karge.

How do we see ourselves in a social space that is almost totally symbolically constructed outside of sensory parameters used in ordinary social contexts? This question broadly alludes to the level of genuineness that follows from mediated, versus direct, social interaction. Does online contact expand self-concept through diversifying personal communication experiences? Can there be such a thing as "excessive" online communication? Would it lead to highly manipulative, technologically masked game-players, or alienated and needful self-absorbed communicators-wthout-a-purpose? These and other serious questions about the effects of using online communication spaces are examined.

• MODULE 3: Online Personal Relationships, Shelley Anstey.

Would you really want to have a relationship with someone that wants to have an online relationship? The strong growth of the Internet has brought with it a genre of technologically facilitated relationships that far surpasses anything ever imagined when the first pen pals exchanged letters. Email, chatlines, digital camera snapshots, and real-time two-way video camera links have expanded the plausible boundaries of social relationships available to tens of millions of people worldwide--at the click of mouse. Does it make any difference if we have few friends at work or school when it's so easy to fill social voids technologically? But, can computer-mediated communication genuinely substitute for real life social contact? Should we even encourage it? These are the issues that are examined and analyzed, with some surprising results, in this unit.

• MODULE 4: Health Communication in Cyberspace, Jamie Korus.

One of the most rapidly growing segments of the Internet involves providing health information and health related products. It is now possible to click on a physician for everything leading up to a medical diagnosis of your symptoms (often based on electronic records made available to the professional service provider). Online discussion groups organized for the purpose of providing social support for people directly (or indirectly) suffering from the consequences of chronic or terminal illnesses have proliferated over the past ten years. Physicians are admonished to: Do no harm. Can addressing health issues and concerns in cyberspace avoid doing any harm? The extraordinary opportunities, and as yet uncalculable risks, of using mediated communication spaces for managing and improving one's health are reviewed and placed in proper perspective by the author.

• MODULE 5: Computer-Mediated Communication and Group Decision-Making, Tammy Ulrich.

There is an old adage that goes: A camel is a horse put together by a committee. What if the members of this proverbial committee never sat across a table, eye-to-eye, with each other? Suppose they only communicated by exchanging email messages? Would they have more likely to create a horse? Maybe they would have assembled a llama. The truth is that we really don't know just how different conventional, face-to-face, groups are from their "virtual" alternatives. It not even clear whether online collaboration is likely to be more productive than conventional group work, or whether it should be the meeting place of last resort. However, one of the most rapidly growing areas in group research focuses on these issues. The author has brought together a broad range of resources to address these important questions and provide some possible answers.

• MODULE 6: Organizational Technologies, Nicole Vandertie

Organizations, particularly large ones, are some of the most technologically dense social entities accessible to the average person. Even relatively small organizations are likely to use email and have access to the World Wide Web. Moreover, the range of so-called "new communication technologies" (e.g., voicemail, wireless telephony, videoconferencing, portable personal computing and management technologies) now available to consumers probably first showed up in businesses and other organizations years earlier. Increasingly, organizational human resource units are applying CD-ROM video and online instruction to employee training needs. Yet, we know very little about the effectiveness of organizational information technologies on factors like employee productivity and satisfaction. The comparative advantages of conventional versus mediated communication in personnel training and development is equally murky. The author surveys recent information on these and related issues in providing clarity and direction about organizational information technology.

• MODULE 7: E-Commerce, Eldridge Sneed.

Everyone wants (and many have become) "dot com millionaires" in the past few years. But, just exactly what does it mean to be involved in "electronic commerce?" More importantly, what does E-commerce have to do with communication? Is the "website the message" to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan? Is there true "interactivity" when responding to a message is confined to clicking through website screens and filling out electronic credit and order forms? Is E-commerce defined by "sellers" or "buyers" or the technology?   For all of the hype and hyperbole surrounding E-commerce there is still relatively little known about how it works (when it's working well) or the facets of persuasion that explain its success (or failure). It is the author's primary task in this unit to help the reader fill-in some of the gaps and find promising ideas that bear on understanding this phenomenon.

• MODULE 8: Instructional Application of Computer-Mediated Communication. Monica LaBonte.

Like other large organizations, education has become a growing consumer and integrator of informational technology (under the covering label of "instructional technology"). However, broad-based acceptance of instructional technology has not come a quickly in education as it has in other organizational enterprises. And, there are risks to rapidly moving toward embracing expensive technologies. Education is often whip-sawed by the varagies of its own philosophies and theories --to say nothing of public opinion about its performance. Most assessments of the diffusion of educational technology show it lags due to financial constraints on both training and equipment. Moreover, there are few compelling trends on which public policy can be built even though small scale successes in applying educational technologies are occur with increasing frequency. The author takes us through the major problems and prospects in applying technology to the classroom with the goal of helping us focus on profitable courses of action for the future.

• MODULE 9: Cyber-Rhetoric, Daniel Foster.

How do we conceive of a "rhetoric of cyberspace" comparable to the rhetorical spaces that have already been identified? In fact, can we profitably make such knowledge claims? The author focuses on the textual nuances of cyberspace and compares them to other rhetorical texts. One of the central textual forms considered is "hypertext" (or hypertext make-up language) the basic syntactical, grammatical, and stylistic language tool used in preparing texts for Internet placement. The unique textuality of hypertext is explored in linguistic, symbolic, and rhetorical levels.

• MODULE 10: Technology and the Law, Christine Jahn.

"Download that file and you're busted!" "You said WHAT about your boss in that chatroom? Oh, are YOU in trouble!" The obligations and prerogatives of communicating in mediated contexts are both fuzzy yet fraught with legal culpability. Who owns what in cyberspace is often unclear and/or undocumentable. However, the easy access to millions of electronically archived images and documents is a temptation that often lands unassuming electronic poachers on the wrong end of an intellectual or artistic property lawsuit. Ownership of electronic messages at work is even muddier. You control some, some of the time; your employer controls some, or most, most of the time. And, how do you know when you've just been dishing a snide opinion or assassinating someone's character? These are complex and intriguing issues. The author takes us through some of the legal and ethical conundrums underlying these issues.

Website assessment planning session.

Assessment Proposal Presentations and discussion.

Working sessions.

Presentation and discussion of Reinnovation products.

Website assessment. Course evaluation.