Summary

Online or computer-mediated communication (CMC) has witnessed widespread penetration into many areas of life – personal and professional. Divorced from the physical or non-verbal cues that characterize face-to-face (FtF) communication, where the communication of emotion can be as significant as the communication of information, how do we cope? Research has indicated that in CMC settings, we compensate for the loss of FtF cues by filling the gaps and expanding upon what limited information we may receive about another person online to construct an impression of that person. In addition, when dealing with automated CMC systems we may find ourselves reacting to computer technology as we would another person. We like it if it is nice to us and dislike it if it is not. Understanding the rules of online interpersonal and human–computer interaction can provide important insights into how to utilize more effectively, and how to design more user-friendly, online communications systems.

Introduction

Internet penetration has displayed dramatic growth in a spell spanning little over a decade with almost one in five people in the world now online. In 1995, fewer than half of 1% of people in the world (16 million) used the internet. By 2000, this figure had grown to 451 million (7%+ of world population) and crashed through the one billion user mark by 2005 (1,018 million; 16% of world population). By the final quarter of 2007, internet penetration had reached 1.2 billion users (www.internetworldstats, 2007). In some parts of the world, internet penetration levels are even more impressive with most people in the USA (70%), over half of those in Australia/Oceania (55%) and approaching half in Europe (42%) being online. It is not just the scale of the online world that is remarkable but also the way it has transformed the lives of people who use it. For the new community of digital information consumers around the world, the internet and its associated online technology have opened huge repositories of content and access to services that cater to almost every need.