Taking Nicola to the next level

October 24, 2006 on 4:33 pm | In Psychology |

One of the authors who has impressed me throughout my studies is Nicola Döring. Her bookchapters in Batinic (1999) are still a milestone when it comes to social interactions in an online world. However, as her theories are mostly based on chat, IRC and MUDs, the online world has changed and the buzz of Web 2.0 has hit the streets. Today, it’s cool to write blogs, to listen to podcasts, and to have one’s video on YouTube.

Yet Nicola’s theories can be taken into this new world of computer mediated communication. Nicola confronts theories of channel reduction and social filtering with theories of social information processing, simulation, and imagination. In a nutshell, she says what we “loose” in comparison to a face-to-face conversation in real life can be made even (or even surpassed) by the way the internet allows us to verbalize our messages and the richness we have to construct online identities.

Several of her concepts taken from the “old” internet to the new one still work: on the one hand because those forms of communication (e.g. IRC) are still available and are being used, and on the other hand because the new forms of communication follow the old theories. Think about lurkers. I bet that the rule “most people on YouTube are lurkers” applies as well as it did/does to online forums. On MySpace we see how much effort people put into the creation of their online identities. The story of lonelygirl15 is an example of an online experiment with a fake personality. However, in my eyes nothing expresses the richness people develop when it comes to present themselves online as this most recent YouTube video shows:

Although one may argue that a lot of things on YouTube are trivial and boring, I am impressed by the diversity of people who participate and the way non-verbal communication is now being transported through the WWW, too. Looks like in CMC we really need to start our engines for the qualitative and quantitative research of web movies. An overview of how that can be done is to be found in Bortz & Döring (2002). A short introduction can also be found in the wikipedia.

Batinic, B. (1999). Internet für Psychologen. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
Bortz, J. & Döring, N. (2002). Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation. Berlin: Springer.