dc.description | Simply put, computer-mediated communication is communication between two or more people via computer. The medium of transmission thus becomes the network between the computers that allows messages to be passed from one to the other. Instances of messages passed along this medium form the communicative acts with which I am concerned. My primary methodology is derived from Hymes' articulation of ethnographies of communication (1962, 1972) and is called here an "ethnography of computer-mediated communication." Such an approach is the main tool I use in conducting a virtual ethnography and can be seen as parallel to other variations on Hymes' concept.1 For the purposes of this paper, then, I wish to examine the scholarship on oral and literate communication in relation to communications theory. My intent is to examine how computer-mediated communication displays both oral and literate characteristics, thus exploding the reductionist arguments sometimes posited in oral/literate dichotomies. Ultimately what is at stake here is an issue in mentalities: does the medium of communication "restructure thought" (e.g., Ong 1992) or do choices in communication lead to epiphenomenal poles on a continuum (e.g., Tannen 1982c)? | eng |