I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to reply to my request for a textbook recommendation for an undergrad course on CMC. I've collected all the recommended titles and am sharing it here. Hope it will be helpful for some of you too :-) Min Wu 1. For some wonderful reference, historical, and foundation material for lectures you should look at The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computers (revised 1993, MIT press) which can still be ordered at a very reasonable price compared to most text books. It provides a lot of material on work done before CMC in many fields that was relevant as well as some ways of thinking about the technology you will not find in most places as well as all the very early work that most students never hear about. The authors were Hiltz and turoff and the original edition was 1978. The 1993 as a new chapter summarizing the next 15 years. the cost benefit analysis done in the book seems to have been forgotten and serves as a very good lecture. So does the early related work in psychology and sociology. The interesting aspect were the predictions in the issue of the Boswash times that began every chapter some of which came true and some which have not yet come true. It sets a nice tone for the students to try making predictions about what might be the next prediction beyond current systems. I forgot to mention one item i consider important. In the new chapter I did a morphological exercise to come up with the three dimensions I felt was most important for guiding the design of different forms of CMC and I have always found that very useful for pointing out to students why the nature of the group and the nature of the application (a Delphi concept from the 1975 Delphi method book) influences the design of CMC systems. These were: 1. the degree of problem complexity from the classic IS literature on the design of information systems. 2. the nature of evidence (C.W. Churchman) with the addition of "negotiated reality" form management science (marketing and behavior, non scientific evidence). 3. An extension of Thomasa's? dimensions of organizational communication types between units or "groups" in the organizations. there are sample group problems used to illustrate the differences for the first two and a sample of how voting is used very differently to do many things/objectives beyond reaching a consensus. Most students (and some faculty) never seem to realize this until it is explained to them. 2. Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., & Tomic, A. (2004). Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. It comes with a companion website: http://www.com.washington.edu/cmc/ 3. I recommend Conversation and Community by Lynn Cherny and Always On by Naomi Baron. 4. I would take sections of both of these for a generalized class on CMCs, but I'm personally looking at these two books for a class I'm designing on new media - they take very different approaches. Deuze, Mrk ed. (2011) *Managing Media Work*. Los Angeles and London: Sage. This one's an industry insider's take on media industries. A good collection but I'm judging it to be an "only textbook" for a particular kind of class. Lister, Martin, John Dovery, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kieran Kelly. (2009) New Media: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. This one is a broader introductory text, but I'm looking at it for a sociology undergraduate class. 5. Baym, N.K. (2010) Personal Connections in the Digital Age, Digital Media and Society Series. Malden, MA: Polity Press (this one is recommended by three 6. Internet (Routledge Introductions to Media and Communications) Lorenzo Cantoni (Author), Stefano Tardini (Author)