I guess it depends on whether we are trying to focus on communication specifically, or on technology use in general? ICT (or information and communication technologies) sort of becomes an umbrella term for all things that allow us to communicate and access information - very useful when talking about phones, internet and everything in between. Yet if we are talking specifically about communication between people, information access becomes a tricky thing to explain - does googling for information about a car or the location of a restaurant on a computer or a cell phone qualify? Lately, I've been using simply "mediated communication" as an umbrella term, I guess because it gets away from words like "online" - which to me seems to signify a computer and rules out a regular landline phone, or "networked" - which to me seems to be an even more ambiguous and relatively overused term. Maybe "mediated communication" is a bit too broad, but I've been using it to define any kind of communication between people that is not face-to-face communication - i.e. mediated by some medium. Irina Mark Bell wrote:
Folks,
I agree with the need for an umbrella term. I am not sure I like "online communication" for the reason "online" is a vague word. Does "online" mean on the "Internet", or a LAN's or both? You could say "online" meant plugged into a digital network, then why not say that?
What about "Digital Networked Communication"?
Mark
-- I was even thinking a little about the future, that place where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess. Nostalgia, by Billy Collins