The problem with chat is that it will change faster than we will be able to evolve theories for it. Those using party-line telephones had audio chat groups made up of the people connected through the party-line. Teletype operators had protocols to form instant chat groups using Morse code. Any early time sharing computer that allowed the operator to type on to a users terminal had the software features that usually allowed a simple chat capability. We had it on EMARSI on the UNIVAC 1108 in 1971 and it was called party-line and appeared as part of a larger system in a conference paper in the 1972 proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Communications. We could set the number of lines allowed in that early version. Today multi-line chat is on skype and gmail by not returning the carriage so even the one line chat is out of date. In 1973 there was also a multi-person chat on Plato the large Computer Assisted Instruction System at the University of Illinois. Chat to those of us evolving the technology was more of an obvious thing, easy to do, that we did not write much about it. In 1973 the people at arpa did not wnat to release the data on message use of the arpa net because it was the biggest application and that was not what they had designed arpa net for. They were afraid it might negatively affect congressional appropriations Why use a very expensive computer network for communications when there was 10 cent telephone calls. That was one reason I wrote the paper below which show that 5-9 people groups could commuicate more for less money using things like computerized conferencing rather than phone calls. That same cost benefit calculation was repeated in chapter 14 of the network nation. Many chats now allow you to save the proceedings, which means the addition of a persistent memory (writing on stone rather than sand) that makes a significant change in the way it is used especially to accomplish true collaborative tasks like making a joint decision. Chat will not be like current capabilities in the next decade as the next big step will be shared blackboards where anyone can type or draw anywhere on the board or add an audio icon that contains a short audio recording so the concept of chat will be text, drawing, handwriting, and voice in one system. Users will evolve methods to use it by imposing structures or communication protocols on the process. In fact it will be quite common to paste audio in word documents to explain figures using audio which will translate to common use in all sorts of electronic documents. This creates problems for theories dealing with a transient technology. Adaptive structurization is one theory that has a lot of merit here. That is a description of what social systems do to a technology in order to make real use of it. reference: Turoff, Murray, (1972), Party-Line and Discussion: Computerized Conferencing Systems, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computers and Communications, October, IEEE. Washington DC
Message: 6 Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 15:33:40 +0100 From: Jesper T?kke <ses@post10.tele.dk> Subject: [Air-L] Chat as a technically mediated social system To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <20090109143339.DMCU28218.fep50.mail.dk@post.tele.dk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Happy New Year!
I have published a paper in the series of papers from the Centre for Internet Research here in Denmark. You can go direct to it following this link: http://www.cfi.au.dk/publikationer/cfi/011_taekke
Abstract This paper provides an analysis of chat as a technical media for communication.
This is realized using the strategy for analyzing that I have called Media
Sociography (T?kke 2006). The Media Sociography is a synthesis of Medium
Theory and the Systems Theoretical Sociology of Niklas Luhmann. The aim of
the paper is to describe social reproduction under the constraints of chat, but
also to show that Media Sociography can provide a unified theoretical framework
for CMC-studies. The paper is also indented to provide an introduction to
the Media Sociography for an English speaking public.
Keywords: Chat, Medium Theory, Systems Theoretical Sociology, Computer
Mediated Communication, Media Sociography.
Best Regards
Jesper
cand.mag, ph.d. Jesper Taekke Dep. for Information- and Media Studies Aarhus University, Denmark http://home16.inet.tele.dk/jesper_t/ -- Distinguished Professor Emeritus Information Systems, NJIT homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff