Personal Relationships and Communication Technology
COMS 930
Fall, 2006

Dr. Nancy Baym
 864-9876
Mailbox: Communication Department Office, 102 Bailey

Course Overview

Human communication has been mediated by technology since the invention of writing. This course examines the role of communication technologies in our personal relationships. This is a fast-growing field, and the course leans heavily toward research published in the last 5 years, however one goal of this course is to enable you to situate contemporary changes against an historical backdrop including the telegraph, the telephone, and other old new media. The courses other goals are:

- to familiarize you with the broad range of interpersonal communication theories, concepts, approaches, and methodologies that have been used to understand interpersonal dimensions of communication technologies.  

- To bring you up to date on the current state of knowledge about how our social lives are mediated by technology and with what consequences.

- Familiarizing yourself with a field also means developing a sense of how you could contribute to it through original research of your own. The work in this course should lead to research projects leading to conference presentations and publication.

Readings

Readings are on reserve at the Edwards Campus library and online. To get to the readings, go to the KU Online Catalog at  http://catalog.lib.ku.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First . Once you locate your course reserve page in the catalog, you will be able to view what is available for you at the library on traditional reserve and will be able to locate the items on electronic reserve by clicking on the electronic reserve tab located at the top of the reserve list. 

It's available on reserve, but I strongly recommend that you go ahead and purchase J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.  ItÕs widely available online through amazon or similar sites.

If you are on the Lawrence  campus, most of the readings are also available on reserve in 102 Bailey. Readings in italics on the reading list below are not available in these paper reserves.

There are quite a few readings. Many of them are short, but there are also some weeks where there are just a lot of pages assigned. If you cannot read it all closely, do not despair. You donÕt need to read every paragraph of each article closely. Instead, read for the main points Ð what was their approach? what were their questions or hypotheses? how did they go about answering them? what are the main things they found?

Assignments

Weekly Responses (15%) : Each weekÕs reading feature a variety of approaches to an issue or set of related issues. Use these weekly writings to stake out your own perspective. Your response should address (1) a theoretical approach or key concepts in the readings that you found particularly compelling or problematic (2) the key finding(s) that you find particularly interesting or counterintuitive (3) at least one research question that emerges from the readings around which you could build a feasible research project. 

Most of the grade will be for a semester-long research project. Grading will be broken down into a Paper Proposal (25%), Final Paper (50%), and a Presentation of the paper to the class (10%). More information on this will be forthcoming.


Course Schedule

August 24: Contemporary Perspectives on Personal Relationships and New Communication Technology

Walther, Gay & Hancock (2005). How do communication and technology researchers study the internet? Journal of Communication 55(3)

Baym, N. (2006). Social life online. In S. Livingstone and L. Lievrouw (eds). The Handbook of New Media, Student Edition. Sage Ltd: London.

FornŒs, J., Klein. K., Ladendorf, J., Sunden, J. & Sveningsson, M, (2002)  Into Digital Borderlands. In J. Fornþs, K. Klein, M. Ladendorf, J. SundŽn & M. Sveningsson (editors) Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang Publishing

Haythornthwaite, C. & Wellman, B. (2002). The internet in everyday life: An introduction. In Wellman, B. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) The Internet in Everyday Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing

Ishii,Kenichi Implications of Mobility: The Uses of Personal Communication Media in Everyday Life. Journal-of-Communication. Vol 56(2) Jun 2006, 346-365

August 31: Personal Relationships and Old New Communication Technologies

Standage, T. (1998). pp. 1-9, 63-68, & 201-211 from The victorian internet. New York: Berkley

Marvin, C. (1988). ÒCommunity and Class OrderÓ in When Old Technologies Were New  63-108 New York: Oxford.

Fischer, C. S. (1992). Personal Calls, Personal Meanings. Chapter 8 in America calling: A social history of the telephone to 1940, pp. 222-254. Berkeley: University of California

Litoff, J. B., & Smith, D. C. (1990). "Will he get my letter?": Popular portrayals of mail and morale during World War II.  Journal of Popular Culture, 23(4), 21-43.

September 7: Technology and Social Change

Katz, J. & Aakhus, M. (2002). Framing the issues, pp. 1-13 In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Sturken, M. & Thomas, D. (2004). Introduction: Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New in M. Sturken & D. Thomas (Eds.). Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies. Available Online: http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html

Ling, R. (2004). Making sense of mobile phone adoption. In The Mobile Connection: The cell phoneÕs impact on society. San Francisco: Elsevier.

Carey, J..  Historical Pragmatism and the internet. New Media & Society 7(4) 443-455.

Fortunati, L. (2005). Is body to body communication still the prototype? The Information Society 21, 53-61.

September 14: Mediated Social Interaction

Mulkay, M. (1985). Agreement and disagreement in conversations and letters. Text, 5, 201-227.

Ling, R. Texting and the growth of asynchronous discourse. In The Mobile Connection: The cell phoneÕs impact on society. San Francisco: Elsevier.

Schegloff, E. (2002) Beginnings in the Telephone. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Herring, S. (2001). Computer-Mediated Discourse. In Tannen, D., Schiffrin, D., & Hamilton, H. (Eds.) Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. PDF file available online at: http://www.let.rug.nl/~redeker/herring.pdfhttp://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html

Puro, J.-P. (2002). Finland: A mobile culture. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Humphries, L (2005) Cell phones in Public: Social interactions in a wireless era. New Media & Society 7(6) 810-833.

Licoppe, C. & Heurtin (2002). France: preserving the image.  In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Communicating Identity

September 21: Social Cues

Contarello, Alberta . Body to body: Copresence in communication. In L. Fortunati, , J. Katz, & R. Riccini  (Eds). (2003). Mediating the human body: Technology, communication, and fashion. (pp. 123-131). Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. xix, 230 pp.

Waskul, D. D., Douglass, M., & Edgley, C. (2004). Outercourse: Body and self in text cybersex. In D. D Waskul (Ed.), Net. SeXXX: Reading on sex, pornography, and the Internet (pp. 13-33). New York: Peter Lang.

Tanis,-Martin; Postmes,-Tom Social Cues and Impression Formation in CMC. Journal-of-Communication. Vol 53(4) Dec 2003, 676-693.

Nowak, K. L., and Rauh, C. (2005). The influence of the avatar on online perceptions of anthropomorphism, androgyny, credibility, homophily, and attraction. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 8. lhttp://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html

Caplan, S. (2005) Social Skill Account of Problematic Internet Use Journal of Communication 721-730. 55(4)

October 5: Self Prepresentation

Paper Proposal Due

Patti M. Valkenburg, Alexander P. Schouten, and Jochen Peter, AdolescentsÕ identity experiments on the internet. New Media Society 7: 383-402.

SundŽn, J. (2002) 'Cyberbodies: Writing Gender in Digital Self-Presentations', in J. Fornþs, K. Klein, M. Ladendorf, J. SundŽn & M. Sveningsson (Eds.) Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Miller, D. & Slater, D. (2000). Being Trini and Representing Trinidad. In The Internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg.

Doering, N. (2002). Personal home pages on the Web: A review of research. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication [On-line], 7(3). Available: http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/doering.html

boyd, d. & Heer, J. (2006) Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster. In Proceedings of the HawaiÕI international conference on system sciences (HICSS-39), Persistent conversation track, Kauai, HI: IEEE Computer Society, January 4-7, 2006.

Mafus & Tracey (2002) Mobile phone consumption and the construction of personhood. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

James E. Katz, and Satomi Sugiyama. Mobile phones as fashion statements: evidence from student surveys in the US and Japan   New Media Society 8: 321-337. http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1686_reg.html

Dyadic Relationships

October 19: Pursuing Romance

Standage, T. (1998). ÒLove over the WiresÓ 127-144 from The victorian internet. New York: Berkley

Adelman, M., & Ahuvia, (1991). A. Mediated channels for mate seeking: A solution to involuntary singlehood?  Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8, 273-289.

Owens, E. (2004). Race, sexual attractiveness, and Internet personal advertisements.  In D. D Waskul (Ed.), Net. SeXXX: Reading on sex, pornography, and the Internet (pp. 217-234). New York: Peter Lang.

Ellison, N., Heino, R., & Gibbs, J. (2006). Managing impressions online: Self-presentation processes in the online dating environment. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 2. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/ellison.htmlhttp://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/ellison.html

October 26: Online Friendships

Kendall, L. (2002) Computer-Mediated Relationships,  In Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online (pp. 139-179). Berkeley:  University of California Press

Baym, N. (2000) I Think of Them As Friends. In Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community,  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Miller , D. & Slater, D. (2000). Relationships. In The Internet: An ethnographic approach. Oxford: Berg

Walther, J. (1996). Computer-mediated communication: Impersonal, interpersonal and hyperpersonal interaction. Communication Research, 23(1), 3-43.

Samantha Henderson, and Michael Gilding ÔIÕve Never Clicked this Much with Anyone in My LifeÕ: Trust and Hyperpersonal Communication in Online Friendships    New Media Society 6: 487-506.

November 2: Close Relationship Formation

McKenna, Green, &. Gleason (2002), "Relationship formation on the Internet: What's the big attraction?" (available online http://homepages.nyu.edu/~kym1/relationship_formation.pdf)

Whitty,-Monica; Gavin,-Jeff. Age/sex/location: Uncovering the social cues in the development of online relationships. CyberPsychology-and-Behavior. Vol 4(5) Oct 2001, 623-630.

LB Hian, SL Chuan, TMK Trevor, BH Detenber.  Getting to know you: Exploring the development of relational intimacy in computer-mediated É- Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2004 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue3/detenber.htmlhttp://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue3/detenber.html

Yum, Y.-O., and Hara, K. (2005). Computer-mediated relationship development: A cross-cultural comparison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/yum.html

Brian H Spitzberg, and Greg Hoobler Cyberstalking and the technologies of interpersonal terrorism New Media Society 4: 71-92.

Kevin B. Wright.  On-Line Relational Maintenance Strategies and Perceptions of Partners within Exclusively Internet-Based and Primarily Internet-Based Relationships Communication Studies, Vol. 55, 2004 http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3669/is_200407/ai_n9451851

November 9: Cross-Media Comparisons

Chan,-Darius-K.-S; Cheng,-Grand-H.-L. A comparison of offline and online friendship qualities at different stages of relationship development. Journal-of-Social-and-Personal-Relationships. Vol 21(3) Jun 2004, 305-320.

Mesch and Talmud (2006) The Quality of Online and Offline Relationships. The Information Society 22: 137-148.

Hancock, J. T., Thom-Santelli, J., & Ritchie, T. (2004).  Deception and Design: The impact of communication technology on lying behavior. CHI 2004, April, Vienna, Austria

Copher, J. I., Kanfer, A. G., & Walker, M. B. (2002). Everyday communication patterns of heavy and light email users.  Ch 9 of Wellman, B. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) (2002) The Internet in Everyday Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing

Harwood, J. (2000) Communication Media Use in Grandparent-Grandchild Relationships. Journal of Communication 50(4) 56-78.

Baym, N.K., Zhang, Y.B., & Lin, M.-C. (2004) Social Interactions across Media: Interpersonal Communication on the Internet, Face-to-Face, and the Telephone. New Media & Society.6(3), 299-318.

Virpi Oksman, and Jussi Turtiainen. Mobile Communication as a Social Stage: Meanings of Mobile Communication in Everyday Life among Teenagers in Finland.    New Media Society 6: 319-339.

November 16: Community

Preece, J. and Diane Maloney-Krichmar (2003) Online Communities . In J. Jacko and A. Sears, A. (Eds.) Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction , Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publishers. Mahwah: NJ. 596-620.  Available online through Jenny PreeceÕs website: http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece/  (look for it in her list of publications).

Steinkuehler, C. A., and Williams, D. (2006). Where everybody knows your (screen) name: Online games as "third places." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(4), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue4/steinkuehler.html

Campbell, S. W. & Kelley, M. J. (2006). Mobile phone use in AA networks: An exploratory study. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 34(2), pp. 191-208.

Matzat, U. (2004). "Cooperation and Community on the Internet: Past Issues and Present Perspectives for theoretical-empirical Internet Research" in: Analyse & Kritik, 26, 1: 63-90.

Feenberg & Bakrdjieva Virtual community: No killer implication. New Media & Society,

Matei, S. & Ball-Rokeach, S. (2002). Belonging in geographic, ethnic, and internet spaces. Ch 14 of Wellman, B. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) (2002) The Internet in Everyday Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing

November 30: Social Networks

Wellman, B., Quan-Haase, A. Q., Boase, J., Chen, W., Hampton, K., de Diaz, I. I., et al. (2003). The social affordances of the Internet for networked individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 8. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social networks and Internet connectivity effects. Information, communication & society, 8, 125-147.

Donath and Boyd, Public Displays of Social Connections. Technology Journal. 22(4), pp. 71-82.

Bryant, J. A., Sanders-Jackson, A., & Smallwood, A. M. K. (2006). IMing, text messaging, and adolescent social networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/bryant.html

December 7: Weaving Communication Technology into Everyday Life

Robinson, J. P., Kestnbaum, M., Neustadtl, A. & Alvarez, A. S. (2002). The internet and other uses of time. Ch 8 of Wellman, B. & Haythornthwaite, C. (Eds.) (2002) The Internet in Everyday Life. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing

L. Haddon (2006) The Contribution of Domestication Research. The Information Society 22(4) 195-204

Ling, R.  & Yttri, B. (2002)  Hypercoordination. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Bakardjieva, M. and Smith, R. (2001) The Internet in Everyday Life. New Media and Society 3(1) 67-83

DeGournay & Smoreda (2002) Communication Technology and Sociability. In J. Katz & M. Aakhus (Eds.) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

December 14: Paper Presentations, Final Paper Due